Marcos Cueto, Cold war, deadly fevers: malaria eradication in Mexico, 1955–1975, Washington, DC, Woodrow Wilson Center Press, and Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007, pp. xvi, 264, £30.00, $45.00 (hardback 978-0-8018-8645-4).

Abstract

The reorganization of international agencies in the early years after the Second World War—the creation of the United Nations and, in particular its specialized agencies, the World Health Organization, UNICEF— brought health to the forefront of development planning and policies. The entry of the United States government into areas of international financing and policy shifted the power base from former colonial empires concerned with post-war reconstruction and decolonization to the bilateral Soviet Union versus United States Cold War superpower framework. From 1945, within the climate of the Cold War, the United States actively engaged in directing policy agendas for development and, as a sub-interest, for health. Until very recently, historical writing on this period has focused on the competition between the United States and the former Soviet Union as superpowers. Marcos Cueto's book, with its focus on Mexico, redirects our attention from the superpowers of the north to the south, from “high-level politics” to “everyday life”( p. 7). The frame for his narrative is the Malaria Eradication Campaign (MEC), part of the World Health Organization's Global Malaria Eradication Campaign, undertaken in Mexico by the National Commission for the Eradication of Paludism from 1955 to 1975. While Cueto critiques the global programme, his focus is to situate his analysis of the development, delivery and responses to this health intervention in Mexico. Linking popular culture with public health, Cueto calls attention to the perhaps unintended consequence of public health campaigns, the resultant “culture of survival” of Mexico's poor, i.e. populations whose experience has led them to become accustomed to struggle to gain access to state programmes and foreign aid in a situation characterized by Cueto's second metaphor, “privileges of poverty”, in which powerful national elites and international agencies control the distribution of limited resources. Cueto exposes the underpinnings of MEC funding (mostly American), delivery (mostly Mexican) and acceptance (mostly elites). The World Health Organization instituted the Global Malaria Eradication Campaign in 1955 but delivered this campaign selectively, notably ignoring sub-Saharan Africa. As Cueto indicates, Paul Russell, a Rockefeller Foundation officer and global campaign promoter, while recorded as stating that Africa was not ready for this campaign, endorsed the programme in Latin America. As a case study, the book is an important contribution to the history of malaria eradication and control and the competing statal and para-statal interests in this period.