Cold War, Deadly Fevers

Malaria Eradication in Mexico, 1955 - 1975

Bibliographic Data

ID2811318
AuthorsJonathan D Ablard (0000-0002-5876-7680, Ithaca College, corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume88
Issue3
Pages564-565
Publication date2008-08-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-2008-373
OpenAlexW2077222044
LanguageEN
Citations received11

In the midst of the multinational health campaign to eradicate malaria in Mexico during the 1950s, poor rural Mexicans gave the nickname “cat killers” to the men who sprayed their homes with DDT. These campesinos had figured out what doctors and scientists had either ignored or failed to notice: DDT is poisonous to more than just mosquitoes and fleas. In Cold War, Deadly Fevers, Marcos Cueto analyzes the often strained encounters between rural Mexicans and a vast array of local, national, and international health officials, Mexican and U.S. policy makers, politicians, and business leaders. Cueto wrote this book to provide public health students, including those whom he teaches in Peru, a useful case study of the perils of top-down international health policies. Cold War, Deadly Fevers is also a sobering transnational history of the ways in which political ideologies and business interests shape international health and aid programs.The decision by international agencies, including the World Health Organization and the Pan-American Sanitary Bureau (PASB), to target malaria for eradication emerged out of the changing technological, medical, and ideological landscape of the post-1945 world. On the technical side, many North American and Latin American doctors and scientists, whose biographies Cueto skillfully weaves into his narrative, were optimistic that malaria could be eliminated with the latest medicines and pesticides, many of which had been developed during the Second World War. The decision to abandon the more limited malaria control approach was a product of both overconfidence about the effectiveness of new technologies and fear that mosquito populations were moving toward resistance to DDT. The final plan focused heavily on Latin America, including Mexico, where the public health infrastructure was deemed sufficiently developed to make the project viable. Planners excluded Africa from the project because the continent’s infrastructure was considered insufficient. Following older models of imperial science, which had been bolstered by medical achievements during the recently concluded world war, malaria eradication was frequently framed in military rhetoric. As with their late nineteenth- century predecessors, advocates of eradication were guided by humanitarianism but they also understood their work’s political and economic ramifications. Ending malaria was the key, many policy makers held, to economic modernization of the “third world.” At the same time, a decisive public health victory would diminish the appeal of communism to the poorest of the poor. The disease itself was often described in terms that echoed the typical anticommunist rhetoric of the day.When asked to provide critical funding to what was to be on paper a multinational aid project, United States lawmakers found the anticommunist and humanitarian arguments appealing. But lawmakers were equally moved to provide funding when they realized that a worldwide campaign against malaria promised both substantial profits and overseas marketing for domestic petrochemical and pharmaceutical industries. This was in the early days of foreign aid, and many at first did not realize that “helping” other countries need not be a selfless act.The project also found a receptive audience among the Mexican political classes of the 1950s. The central government’s efforts at modernization, mild reform, and avoiding radical land reform coincided neatly with the broader ideological and financial imperatives of the eradication program. The project also fit with the prevailing pronatalist attitude of many Mexican leaders who still saw underpopulation as a threat to national well-being. Eliminating the disease would both increase the population of the nation and increase its agricultural capacity. By 1955, following almost ten years of campaigning by an assortment of international health officials, a well-funded eradication program was inaugurated under the auspices of PASB, UNICEF, and the Mexican government.Although the campaign enjoyed some early successes, by the late 1960s malaria returned to areas where it was thought to have been eliminated, and it lingered in many of the poorest rural areas. Mexican and international health officials were quick to blame local resistance, but Cueto demonstrates that the campaign suffered from a number of inherent flaws. The program’s vertical design privileged foreign expertise and planning. Health officials, for the most part, assumed that the solution to malaria was a purely scientific and medical problem; they simply did not entertain the idea that local conditions, both physical and social, might have an impact on the outcome. Not only did the designers of the campaign ignore indigenous people’s adversarial relationship to both Western medicine and the central state, but they even rejected the need for additional malaria research to be conducted in-country. Yet the greatest design flaw was the premise that malaria eradication could precede the development of adequate primary care and modern sanitation. In fact, many campesinos wondered why the state was expending such effort and money on one insect when so many basic needs went unmet.Cold Wars, Deadly Fevers is a well-crafted and complex study that offers important lessons on the history of international health and foreign aid. One of the greatest strengths of this impressive work, however, is Cueto’s insight into the motivations and attitudes of the people who created the program, those who implemented it, and those who were deemed its beneficiaries

Economic growth · Ideology · Latin Americans · Malaria · Multinational corporation · Political science · Politics · Public health · History of Medicine and Tropical Health · Law · Medicine · Nursing

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