Fred Soper | We Almost Eradicated Malaria. Then We Stopped.

About this episode

For every three soldiers General MacArthur had in the Pacific during World War II, one was on the front line, one was on leave, and one was flat on his back in a hospital with malaria. That ratio is what kicked off one of the most arrogant public health projects in history. Fred Soper was a guy from Kansas who figured out that everyone fighting malaria was fighting the wrong thing. While other researchers dosed people with drugs to prevent and treat the disease, Soper said go after the mosquitoes instead. He mapped Brazil into a grid, built an army of sprayers, and coated everything in a pesticide called DDT that would keep killing mosquitoes for months after a single pass. It worked so well the US government handed him Japan, then the American South, then the whole globe. By the early 1960s malaria had been wiped out almost everywhere, with one glaring exception: the 1955 World Health Assembly voted not to extend eradication into sub-Saharan Africa, where the deadliest strain lived and the cost and danger ran highest. Jaron and Tim trace how JFK pushed funding, how governments pulled it, how the mosquitoes evolved resistance to DDT, and how George W. Bush reading the novel Root