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Fred Soper and the Global Malaria Eradication Programme

Journal of Public Health Policy, 2002 by Gladwell, Malcolm

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It is hard to overestimate the impact that DDT's early success had on the world of public health. In the nineteen-forties, there was still malaria in the American South. There was malaria throughout Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean. In India alone, malaria killed eight hundred thousand people a year. When, in 1920, William Gorgas, the man who cleansed the Panama Canal Zone of malaria, fell mortally ill during a trip through England, he was knighted on his deathbed by King George V and given an official state funeral at St Paul's Cathedral-and this for an American who just happened to be in town when he died. That is what it meant to be a malaria fighter in the first half of the last century. And now there was a chemical-the first successful synthetic pesticide-that seemed to have an almost magical ability to kill mosquitoes. In 1948, Muller won the Nobel Prize for his work with DDT, and over the next twenty years his discovery became the centerpiece of the most ambitious public-health campaign in history.

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Today, of course, DDT is a symbol of all that is dangerous about man's attempts to interfere with nature. Rachel Carson, in her landmark 1962 book, "Silent Spring," wrote memorably of the chemical's environmental consequences, how its unusual persistence and toxicity had laid waste to wildlife and aquatic ecosystems. Only two countries-India and China-continue to manufacture the substance, and only a few dozen more still use it. In May, at the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, more than ninety countries signed a treaty, placing DDT on a restricted-use list, and asking all those still using the chemical to develop plans for phasing it out entirely. On the eve of its burial, however-and at a time when the threat of insect-borne disease around the world seems ro be resurgent-it is worth remembering that people once felt very differently about DDT, and that between the end of the second World War and the beginning of the nineteen-sixties it was considered not a dangerous pollutant but a lifesaver. The chief proponent of that view was a largely forgotten man named Fred Soper, who ranks as one of the unsung heroes of the twentieth century. With DDT as his weapon, Sopor almost saved the world from one of its most lethal afflictions. Had he succeeded, we would not today be writing DDT's obituary. We would view it in the same heroic light as penicillin and the polio vaccine.

Fred Soper was a physically imposing man. He wore a suit, it was said, like a uniform. His hair was swept straight back from his forehead. His eyes were narrow. He had large wire-rimmed glasses, and a fastidiously maintained David Niven mustache. Soper was born in Kansas in 1893, received a doctorate from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and spent the better part of his career working for the Rockefeller Foundation, which in the years before the Second World War-before the establishment of the United Nations and the World Health Organization-functioned as the world's unofficial public-health directorate, using its enormous resources to fight everything from yellow fever in Colombia to hook-worm in Thailand.

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Fred Soper and the Global Malaria Eradication Programme

Journal of Public Health Policy, 2002 by Gladwell, Malcolm

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