ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The politics of immunity in 20th century malaria interventions: a Soviet perspective

• In Event: (Re)thinking Histories of Disease in the “Tropics” (II)

English Abstract

Ideas of immunity played an important role in the history of malaria interventions in tropical regions during the 20th century. International malaria campaigns, including the WHO’s Global Malaria Eradication Programme, were often accompanied by concerns that they would serve to reduce the partial immunity conferred by constant exposure, and thus might result in more deadly epidemics in the future. This paper will examine alternative discourses of malaria immunity that emerged among Soviet experts from the 1930s to the 1950s, highlighting their expansive view of the role of the host (and socio-environmental context) in the course of infection and exploring their implicit critiques of international ideas and their implications. By placing Soviet thought in conversation with transnational tropical medicine, it will interrogate how interactions of biomedical knowledge with colonial public-health frameworks produced discourses of tropical endemicity that limited approaches to the problem of malaria.

Author

• Marek Robert Eby, University of Leeds