The proposed study will examine the history of malaria eradication programs from World War II through the 1970s. The project attempts to better understand the origins, early success, and ultimate failure of malaria eradication efforts by placing these developments within the intellectual, economic, and political environment associated with post-war colonial and post-colonial development. By doing so, the project will contextualize and add a global perspective to the vast array of local medical studies that have previously examined malaria eradication and resurgence. A central question of this research will be to what degree and in what wayswas the history of post-war malaria eradication programs linked conceptually and organizationally to the requirements of tropical development, and how did this linkage shape the development of anti-malaria campaigns. The proposal calls for support for two sets of related research activities. During the first phase of the project the applicants propose to explore the constellation of interests and perspectives that shaped the development of malaria eradication programs during and following WWII within such international health and development organizations as the World Health Organization, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Rockefeller Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development. As part of this inquiry, he also proposes to examine the extent to which the very language,ideas, and assumptions underlying malaria eradication programs reflectedand were part of a wider discourse on modernization and tropical development emerging in the West at this time. The second phase of the project will examine how the ideas about malaria eradication, generated within Western health and development organizations, were implemented in a number of tropical areas and how their implementation was shaped by local patterns of economic and political development. This will involve research by the applicantin Zimbabwe and South Africa. Data obtained by the investigator will be published as part of a collection of comparative essays on the history of malaria eradication. The collection will also include essays on Senegal, Sri Lanka, India, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Columbia and Mexico.
