Malaria, the Politics of Public Health and the International Crisis

Review of Radical Political Economics

Volumn 9, Issue 1, 1977, Pages 81-103

  Cleaver, Harry ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; HISTORY; HISTORY OF MEDICINE; MALARIA; PUBLIC HEALTH;

HISTORY OF MEDICINE, MODERN; MALARIA; PUBLIC HEALTH;

EID: 0017562076     PISSN: 04866134     EISSN: 15528502     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/048661347700900106     Document Type: Article

References (43)

1. Government data for 1962 to 1975 are cited in N.P. Sinha, “Malaria Eradication: What Went Wrong?”, Economic and Political Weekly, June 26, 1976. The 10 million estimate is from an internal AID document, USAID, “Malaria Eradication Programs,” USAID Audit Report No. 76-348, May 7, 1976, p. 40.
2. Malaria Makes a Comeback,” War on Hunger, October 1975, p. 27.
3. The sources of data on the spread of malaria are princip-WHO, “Development of the Anti-Malaria Program,” Executive Board, 55th Session, Provisional Agenda Item 2.9, 13 December 1974
4. M.A. Farid, “The World Malaria Situation,” Draft Agenda Item 2, UNEP-WHO Meeting on the Bio-Environmental Methods of Control of Malaria, Document MAL-WP-75.2, Lima, 10-15 December 1975
5. A.W.A. Brown, J. Haworth and A.R. Zahar, “Malaria Eradication and Control From a Global Standpoint: A Review Article,” Journal of Medical Entomology, 29 May 1976.
6. WHO, “Malaria Control in Countries Where Time-Limited Eradication is Impracticable at Present: Report of a WHO Interregional Conference,” WHO Technical Report Series, No. 537, Geneva 1974.
7. USAID, “Report on the Audit of the Malaria Eradication Program,” Audit Report No. 74-003, August 31, 1973, p. 13.
8. M. Boccaccio, “Ground Itch and Dew Poison, the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission, 1909-14,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, January 1972.
9. R. Fosdick, The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation, pp. 47-50; ICA Expert Panel on Malaria, “Report and Recommendations on Malaria: A Summary,” Amer. J. of Trop. Med. and Hyg., July 1961.
10. The aim of the Rockefeller malaria programs, according to Director Wickliffe Rose, was “the highest degree of malaria control consistent with a reasonably low per capita cost.” Cited in Paul Russell, Man's Mastery of Malaria. N.Y., 1955, p. 232. On the phenomenon of malaria regression also see Russell, Chapter 13.
11. For a quick look at the net negative impact of French colonial medicine in Morrocco and at the seamier side of medicine - the use of doctors as political and even military spys, differential provision of services, etc. - see James Paul, “Medicine and Imperialism,” Health Politics, NYU, 1975, 5, 4, pp. 3-11.
12. Victor Heiser, who worked first with the U.S. Army and
13. Victor Heiser, An American Doctor's Odyssey, (New York, Norton, 1936).
14. A detailed study which summarizes and synthesizes dozens of earlier studies concerning the impact and costs of malaria on India is that by Lieut.-Col. J.A. Sinton, What Malaria Costs India, Health Bulletin No. 26, Government of India, 1956, which is a compilation and condensation of articles written in the 1930s and published in the Records of the Malaria Survey of India (Vol. V., Nos. 3,4, 1935 and Vol. VI, No. 1, 1936). Especially interesting is Chapter 4 on “The Financial and Economic Losses” which contains much information on the motivations and extent of anti-malaria work in 20th Century colonial India.
15. Heiser describes many situations where disease was causing high, sometimes prohibitive, costs to businessmen, pp. 37-8, 269, 292, 295-7, 300-1, 449, 455, 456-7. Among the costs of sickness incurred by United Fruit and other companies were: low productivity due to illness, time lost due to hospital visits, excessive housing costs caused by the necessity of keeping more workers than would otherwise be necessary. Edward I. Salisbury (United Fruit medical director), “Costs and Returns of Industrial Health Services,” Industry and Tropical Health, Vol. 1, 1950, pp. 172-3.
16. John C. McClintock, “Responsibilities of Industry for Health of local Populations Abroad,” Industry and Tropical Health, Vol. II, 4-20-22, 1954, pp. 39-42. On the early need for plantation medicine in labor scarce Hawaii,
17. see Dr. William B. Patterson “Plantation Medicine in Hawaii,” Industrial Medicine and Surgery, October 1949.
18. In 1916 Gorgas headed an International Health Board commission to South and Central America to study the possibilities of a yellow fever control campaign. When he retired from his job of Surgeon General in 1918, he joined the IHB to head their yellow fever work, Rockefeller Foundation, Annual Report, 1920.
19. Kenneth W. Thompson, Foreign Assistance: A View from the Private Sector, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1972) pp. 11-12.
20. On the Keynesian effort to harness class struggle for capitalist development see Guido Baldi, “Theses on the Mass Worker and Social Capital,” Radical America, May-June, 1972 and Mario Tronti, “Workers and Capital,” Telos, No. 14.
21. The major studies which founded this concept as strategy included those of economists Theodore Schultz, Gary Becker and Robert Solow, e.g. G. Becker, Human Capital (N.Y., NBER, 1965)
22. R. Solow, “A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 1965.
23. On the Kennedy era investments in “human capital” as a strategy in the class struggle see George Caffentzis, “Throwing Away the Ladder: The Universities in Crisis,” Zerowork, No. 1, 1975.
24. The story and importance of Dooley's use of medical care and role in the Vietnam Lobby, have been analysed in R. Scheer, “Hand Down Your Head Tom Dooley,” Ramparts Jan.-Feb. 1965, and more recently
25. S. Weissman, “Tom Dooley-CIA,” Pacific Research and World Empire Telegram, June 1972, which was able to draw upon the CIA material in the Pentagon Papers.
26. James S. Simmon, “Welcoming Address,” Industry and Tropical Health, Vol. 1, 1950, p. 13.
27. J.B. Bingham, Shirt-Sleeve Diplomacy: Point 4 in Action, (New York: John Day, 1953). On the IIAA see pp. 19-23. On Point 4 public health programs see pp. 82-103.
28. E. Braff and W. Winklestein, “Field Treatment of Trachoma in North Vietnam,” Public Health Reports, Vol. 67, No. 12, December 1952, p. 1233.
29. W.D. Tigertt, “Present and Potential Malaria Problems,” in E.H. Sadun (ed) “Research in Malaria,” Military Medicine, the official journal of the Association of Military Surgeons of the U.S., Vol. 131, Supplement No. 9, Sept. 1966.
30. David Wise and T.B. Ross, The Invisible Government, pp. 110-14. Also Jerrold L. Waiden “Restraining the CIA” in Richard Blum (ed) Surveillance and Espoinage in a Free Society, (NY: Praeger, 1972), p. 225 and IDAB, “Malaria Eradication” Special Report to the President, April 13, 1965, pp. 8-9.
31. Mutual Security Agency, Southeast Asia, 1952, p. 51.
32. IDAB, “Malaria Eradication,” Southeast Asia
33. This quote comes from a discussion between D.K. Viswanathan and a vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation, see Viswanathan's The Conquest of Malaria in India: An Indo-American Cooperative Effort, Bombay, 1958.
34. H. Cleaver, “The Internationalization of Capital and the Mode of Production in Agriculture,” Economic and Political Weekly, March 27, 1976.
35. K. Marx, Capital, Volume I, eg. Chap. XV, section 3a.
36. K. Marx, The Civil War in France, first version.
37. K. Marx, Capital (NY: International Publishers) Vol. I, Chap. XXIII. Marx is somewhat ambiguous on this point since he recognizes that the production of labor power “is productive to the capitalist and to the State, since it is the production of the power that creates their wealth.” (p. 573, my emphasis) But generally he holds to the view that while “The maintenance and reproduction of the working class is, and must ever be, a necessary condition to the reproduction of capital,” nevertheless capital “may safely leave its fulfilment to the laborer's instincts of self preservation and of propagation.” (p. 572) Also see Volume II, pp. 57-8.
38. Selma James' two seminal articles on the peasant as unwaged worker for capital are: Sex. Race and Class (Bristol, Falling Wall Press, 1975) and “Wageless of the World” in Wendy Edmond and Suzie Fleming, All Work and No Pay (Bristol, Falling Wall Press, 1975).
39. The two major groups working within this perspective in the United States today are Wages for Housework and Zerowork. The Wages for Housework movement of unwaged women was able, through a series of political struggles to break with the limited factory focus of the Left, to begin to develop an analysis of other sectors of the unwaged, and to launch an autonomous movement that challenges capital both right and left. Mariarosa Dalla Costa's “Women and the Subversion of the Community,” in The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (Bristol, Falling Wall Press, 1972). Zerowork, a journal published in New York by American, Canadian and Italian men, has set out a detailed analysis of the cycle of struggles of the 1960s which is outlined briefly in part IV of this paper. Zerowork (292 Warren St. Brookline, N.Y. December 1975).
40. Mario Montano, “Notes on the International Crisis,” Zerowork, No. 1, Dec. 1975, p. 51.
41. On the development offer see Tillman Durdin, “Drive to Pacify Southern Philippine Moslems is Begun,” New York Times, December 11, 1972. On the use of malaria de-control see: James P. Sterba, “Manila is Using Malaria Mosquitos to Fight Rebels,” New York Times, March 29, 1973.
42. K. Marx, Capital, Vol. II, p. 57.
43. This is in keeping with Marx's analysis of transportation in Capital, Vol. II, Chapter VI, section 111.