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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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In those years, malaria warriors fell into one of two camps. The first held that the real enemy was the malaria parasite-the protozoan that mosquitoes pick up from the blood of an infected person and transmit to others. The best way to break the chain of infection, this group argued, was to treat the sick with antimalarial drugs, to kill the protozoan so there was nothing for mosquitoes to transmit. The second camp held, to the contrary, that the mosquito was the real enemy, since people would not get malaria in the first place if there were no mosquitoes around to bite them. Soper belonged to the latter group, and his special contribution was to raise the killing of mosquitoes to an art. Gorgas, Soper's legendary predecessor, said that in order to fight malaria you had to learn to think like a mosquito. Soper disagreed. Fighting malaria, he said, had very little to do with the intricacies of science and biology. The key was learning to think like the men he hired to go door-to-door and stream-to-stream, killing mosquitoes. His method was to apply motivation, discipline, organization, and zeal, in understanding human nature. Fred Soper was the General Patton of entomology.

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While working in South America in 1930, Soper had enforced a rigorous protocol for inspecting houses for mosquito infestation, which involved checking cisterns and climbing along roof gutters. (He pushed himself so hard perfecting the system in the field that he lost twenty-seven pounds in three months.) He would map an area to be cleansed of mosquitoes, give each house a number, and then assign each number to a sector. A sector, in turn, would be assigned to an inspector, armed with the crude pesticides then available; the inspector's schedule for each day was planned to the minute, in advance, and his work double-checked by a supervisor. If a supervisor found a mosquito that the inspector had missed, he received a bonus. And if the supervisor found that the inspector had deviated by more than ten minutes from his pre-assigned schedule the inspector was docked a day's pay. Once, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, a large ammunition dump-the Niteroi Arsenal-blew up. Soper, it was said, heard the explosion in his office, checked the location of the arsenal on one of his maps, verified by the master schedule that an inspector was at the dump at the time of the accident, and immediately sent condolences and a check to the widow. The next day, the inspector showed up for work, and Soper fired him on the spot-for being alive. Soper, in one memorable description, "seemed equally capable of brow-beating man or mosquito." He did not engage in small talk. In 1973, at Soper's eightieth-birthday party, a former colleague recounted how much weight he had lost working for Soper; another told a story of how Soper looked at him uncomprehendingly when he asked to go home to visit his ailing wife; a third spoke of Soper's betting prowess. "He was very cold and very formal," remembers Andrew Spielman, a senior investigator in tropical disease at the Harvard School of Public Health and the author, with Michael D'Antonio, of the marvellous new book "Mosquito: A Natural History of Our Most Persistent and Deadly Foe." "He always wore a suit and tie. With that thin little mustache and big long upper lip, he scared the hell out of me."

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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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