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Industry: Email Alert RSS FeedFred Soper and the Global Malaria Eradication Programme
Journal of Public Health Policy, 2002 by Gladwell, Malcolm
Aitken is a handsome, courtly man of eighty-eight, lean and patrician in appearance. He lives outside New Haven, in an apartment filled with art and furniture from his time in Sardinia. As he thought back to those years, there were tears in his eyes, and at that moment it was possible to appreciate the excitement that gripped malariologists in the wake of the second World War.
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The old-school mosquito men called themselves mud-hen malariologists, because they did their job in swamps and ditches and stagnant pools of water. Paris green and pyrethrum were crude insecticides that had to be applied repeatedly; pyrethrum killed only those mosquitoes that happened to be in the room when you were spraying. But here, seemingly, was a clean, pure, perfectly modern weapon. You could spray a tiny amount on a wall, and that single application would kill virtually every mosquito landing on that surface for the next six months. Who needed a standing army of inspectors anymore? Who needed to slog through swamps? This was an age of heroics in medicine. Sabin and Salk were working on polio vaccines with an eye to driving that disease to extinction. Penicillin was brand new, and so effective that epidemiologists were dreaming of an America without venereal disease. The extinction of smallpox, that oldest of scourges, seemed possible. All the things that we find sinister about DDT today-the fact that it killed everything it touched, and kept on killing everything it touched-were precisely what made it so inspiring at the time. "The public-health service didn't pay us a lot," says McWilson Warren, who spent the early part of his career fighting malaria in the Malaysian jungle. "So why were we there? Because there was something so wonderful about being involved with people who thought they were doing something more important than themselves." In the middle of the war, Soper had gone to Egypt, and warned the government that it had an incipient invasion of gambiae. The government ignored him, and the next year the country was hit with an epidemic that left more than a hundred thousand dead. In his diary, Soper wrote of his subsequent trip to Egypt, "In the afternoon to the Palace where Mr. Jacobs presents me to His Majesty King Faruk. The King says that he is sorry to know that measures I suggested last year were not taken at that time." Soper had triumphed over gambiae in Brazil, driven lice from Cairo and Naples, and had a weapon, DDT, that seemed like a gift from God-and now kings were apologizing to him. Soper started to dream big: Why not try to drive malaria from the entire world?
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