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Marianne Fedunkiw, PhD

Marianne Fedunkiw is with the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford, Oxford, England.

Correspondence: Requests for reprints should be sent to Marianne Fedunkiw, PhD, Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford, 45–47 Banbury Road, Oxford, UK OX2 6PE (e-mail: marianne.fedunkiw{at}wuhmo.ox.ac.uk).

	ABSTRACT

TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION SCHOLARLY ANALYSES OF PUBLIC... A POWERFUL WEAPON IN... EARLY EFFORTS IN MALARIA... WORLD WAR II AND... ECHOES OF VENEREAL DISEASE... 1946-1961: THE POSTCOLONIAL ERA... A COMPARISON OF 2... 1962-1982: DISILLUSIONMENT AND... 1983-PRESENT: A NEW AGE... CONCLUSION Endnotes

 

I offer a historical examination of a group of malaria motion pictures, a subset of a larger genre of public health films. The majority of these more than 100 films were produced or coproduced by American and British agencies or production companies since 1940. The material is divided into 5 chronological periods, which include World War II, the postcolonial or DDT era (1946–1961), and the past 2 decades.

The films themselves, I argue, represent a unique record of preventive measures, clinical techniques, and sociocultural biases, all within the context of a history of one of the greatest continuing challenges in public health. The malaria films, as a group, represent a large body of work that has not yet been brought together or analyzed as historical sources.

	INTRODUCTION

TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION SCHOLARLY ANALYSES OF PUBLIC... A POWERFUL WEAPON IN... EARLY EFFORTS IN MALARIA... WORLD WAR II AND... ECHOES OF VENEREAL DISEASE... 1946-1961: THE POSTCOLONIAL ERA... A COMPARISON OF 2... 1962-1982: DISILLUSIONMENT AND... 1983-PRESENT: A NEW AGE... CONCLUSION Endnotes

 
THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION (WHO) calls malaria "one of the major public health challenges undermining development in the poorest countries of the world"; it kills one African child every 30 seconds.¹ Since the malaria parasite was identified in 1880, various preventive measures and eradication strategies have been put in place to try to control it. One of these strategies is a tool of public health that has been little analyzed: motion pictures and, later, videos.

In this article I offer insight into a specialized tool in preventive medicine that played into the ideal of malaria public health as a cultural and socio-organizational challenge as much as a medical or ecological problem. The films represent a unique record of preventive measures, clinical techniques, and sociocultural biases, all within the context of a history of one of the greatest continuing challenges in public health, where "public" is a specific audience of soldiers, clinicians, or indigenous peoples. It is impossible to disassociate the medical techniques and technologies employed from the cultural contexts that are depicted and in which these films were designed to be used. Although the audience and context may change—for example, from the US or British military during World War II to colonial Kenya or postcolonial Ghana to the worldwide television-viewing public of today—each film was made either to educate or to record a particular antimalarial campaign.

	SCHOLARLY ANALYSES OF PUBLIC HEALTH FILMS

TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION SCHOLARLY ANALYSES OF PUBLIC... A POWERFUL WEAPON IN... EARLY EFFORTS IN MALARIA... WORLD WAR II AND... ECHOES OF VENEREAL DISEASE... 1946-1961: THE POSTCOLONIAL ERA... A COMPARISON OF 2... 1962-1982: DISILLUSIONMENT AND... 1983-PRESENT: A NEW AGE... CONCLUSION Endnotes

 
Although films are one of the most popular forms of both entertainment and education, there are few scholarly analyses of medical non–feature films.² One of the challenges is that little documentation exists to answer key research questions, including the following: Who decided on the final script and the shots to be filmed? Where was the film shown? How many people were present? Was the film preceded or followed by a lecture or debriefing? What languages were chosen for the film and why? How can one gauge the effectiveness of a film as a public health tool? How much did the film cost to make and to distribute? When did the film cease to be used and why?

Historians are left to speculate on these key questions. The reasons for the lack of accompanying documentation are not clear, but it may be that the films were viewed as "documents" themselves³ or that during times of crisis, such as World War II, the need to produce films quickly superseded the need to document the making of the films for future historical review. Furthermore, if the film unit or production company was accountable only for a final product, production notes were not seen as valuable and were therefore discarded. Despite these limitations, there is a small group of scholars who have done research into public health films,⁴ including malaria films.⁵

Occasionally, where the question of financial sponsorship enters the picture, documents do exist. The Rockefeller Foundation, for example, funded one of the earliest malaria films. Documents detailing the making of Malaria (1925), including costs, script revisions, and the reasons for discontinuing distribution, are at the Rockefeller Archive Center.⁶

	A POWERFUL WEAPON IN THE "WARFARE AGAINST DISEASE"

TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION SCHOLARLY ANALYSES OF PUBLIC... A POWERFUL WEAPON IN... EARLY EFFORTS IN MALARIA... WORLD WAR II AND... ECHOES OF VENEREAL DISEASE... 1946-1961: THE POSTCOLONIAL ERA... A COMPARISON OF 2... 1962-1982: DISILLUSIONMENT AND... 1983-PRESENT: A NEW AGE... CONCLUSION Endnotes

 
Films have been recognized as valuable public health tools for more than 75 years. In 1927, W. Allen Daley, a British medical officer of health, coauthored a book with nurse Hester Viney that addressed the value of film as a public health tool. In a chapter titled "The Film and Broadcasting in Health Teaching," Daley and Viney wrote, "Modern science has put two powerful weapons in the hands of doctors and nurses in their agelong [sic] warfare against disease in the new discoveries of cinematography and broadcasting."⁷ They went on to explain that the medium of film was well suited to explaining even complex health concepts that would otherwise require "considerable technical knowledge." "The film has the great advantage," they wrote, "of showing cause and effect, often powerfully emphasised, within the space of a pleasantly occupied half-hour."⁸

It is no surprise, then, that public health films flourished during the next decade. Timothy Boon estimates that 350 health films were made in Britain between 1911 and 1939, with two thirds of these being made in the 1930s. He notes that the estimated cost of an 8-minute film was £1000, although low-budget productions were said to yield a 10-minute film for as little as £150.⁹ Film production did and does have its limitations, including escalating costs because of cast, location (particularly if outdoor shots were required), lighting, sound and music where applicable, scenery, editing, and reshooting.¹⁰ Production limitations aside, film was a powerful and popular medium; once made, one copy could be used again and again and shown to unlimited numbers. The only limitations for showing a film, where language was not an issue, were the equipment and the size of the venue. In fact, Boon notes that more than 2500 people came to see the screening of a venereal disease film in Blackburn, then a small town, northwest of Manchester.¹¹ As Daley and Viney recognized in 1927, films were "a very popular form of amusement, and a large audience who would not desire to hear a lecture will throng to see a film."¹²

	EARLY EFFORTS IN MALARIA PUBLIC HEALTH FILMS

TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION SCHOLARLY ANALYSES OF PUBLIC... A POWERFUL WEAPON IN... EARLY EFFORTS IN MALARIA... WORLD WAR II AND... ECHOES OF VENEREAL DISEASE... 1946-1961: THE POSTCOLONIAL ERA... A COMPARISON OF 2... 1962-1982: DISILLUSIONMENT AND... 1983-PRESENT: A NEW AGE... CONCLUSION Endnotes

 
The history of malaria prevention during the 20th century is depicted in these films. But malaria has been plaguing man since at least the fourth century BC.¹³ It was a French colonial military officer, Charles Alphonse Laveran, who is credited with identifying live malaria parasites in the blood in 1880. Eighteen years later, a group of Italian malariologists led by Giovanni Battista Grassi described how human malaria was transmitted by the anopheles mosquito. But it was the English malariologist Ronald Ross who would have the glory—and the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1902—for his discovery of mosquitoes as malarial vectors.¹⁴

Below: A scene from the 1925 Rockfeller Foundation film, "Malaria," shows a man suffering from malarial fever and chills. The film, produced with a budget of $10 500, was a two-reel, silent feature. Translations of the titles were made in Spanish, Portuguese, and French. Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center.

Antimalarial drugs evolved from quinine to mepacrine, atabrine, and chloroquine. Knowing that mosquitoes were the villains as much as the individual plasmodium, malaria prevention over the past century has included strategies as varied as mosquito nets and screens; destruction of mosquito larvae, pupae, and adults (by filling in their breeding ponds and spraying insecticides); and DDT.

The pre-1930 malaria film output included amateur as well as professional films.¹⁵ The footage, dating as far back as 1912, was produced by commercial production houses as varied as Pathé, Edison, Gaumont, and British Instructional Films, as well as the University of California (Berkeley) and the Department of Bacteriology of the University of Rochester in New York. Of the 16 films and newsreel clips that I know were made, only 7 are available as viewing copies.¹⁶ The predominant malaria prevention methods in these films are spraying stagnant water with oil or insecticides and filling in stagnant ponds. Much of this film record has been lost or destroyed, particularly if the film was not dubbed over onto safety stock or video before the original deteriorated.

Left: "Malaria" (1925) was divided into 3 segments. Part One focused on the symptoms and economic impact of the disease. Part Two outlined the life cycle of the mosquito and the malaria parasite. Part Three showed various mosquito eradication techniques such as dusting the surface of stagnant pools of water with an arsenic compound called Paris green. Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center.

	WORLD WAR II AND MALARIA: "HEALTH MENACE NO. 1 IN THIS WAR"

TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION SCHOLARLY ANALYSES OF PUBLIC... A POWERFUL WEAPON IN... EARLY EFFORTS IN MALARIA... WORLD WAR II AND... ECHOES OF VENEREAL DISEASE... 1946-1961: THE POSTCOLONIAL ERA... A COMPARISON OF 2... 1962-1982: DISILLUSIONMENT AND... 1983-PRESENT: A NEW AGE... CONCLUSION Endnotes

 
Malaria presented a grave problem for the military, particularly those stationed in the Pacific theater. The allied forces had a strategic interest in keeping their troops in fighting form, but this proved to be a challenge. As British Field Marshal Sir William Slim said in reference to the gravity of the problem of malaria for both UK and US troops, "In 1943, for every man evacuated with wounds, we had 128 evacuated sick. The annual malaria rate alone was 84% per annum of the total strength of the army and still higher among the forward troops. . . . A simple calculation showed me that in a matter of months at this rate my army would have melted away. Indeed it was doing so under my eyes."¹⁷ C. W. Hays cites rates of malaria attack among US forces as high as 3300 cases per 1000 men per annum at Milne Bay, New Guinea in January 1943. The attack rate for the whole southwest Pacific during February 1943 was 794 per 1000 men per annum.¹⁸ During World War II, there were 113 256 new cases of malaria in the US Navy and Marine forces alone, which resulted in more than 3.3 million sick days.¹⁹ Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox wrote in 1944 that "malaria most assuredly is health menace No. 1 in this war."²⁰

Top: A young doctor visits a malaria patient at home to take a sample of blood and test for the malaria parasite in a scene from the silent film "Malaria" (1925).

To curb this dramatic attrition, the military used its own command-based infrastructure. The British forces instituted a series of surprise checks to determine if quinacrine hydrochloride pills, an antimalarial drug, were being taken daily. "If the overall result was less than ninety-five percent positive, I sacked the commanding officer," Slim said. "I only had to sack three; by then the rest had got my meaning."²¹ The American forces were facing great losses due to malaria as well. It is reported that US General Douglas MacArthur told Dr Paul F. Russell, US Army colonel and chief of the Malaria Control Branch, in May 1943 that "this will be a long war if for every division I have facing the enemy I must count on a second division in the hospital with malaria and a third division convalescing from this debilitating disease!"²² To prevent this, MacArthur instituted greater command emphasis on antimalarial measures among American troops. Many of these measures, including taking antimalarial pills, maintaining and properly using mosquito netting, covering the skin with clothing or mosquito repellent especially at night, and filling in stagnant breeding pools, are depicted in the films made from 1940 to 1945.²³

Most of the films made in this brief period share a number of common characteristics: they have a public health purpose and employ a story with a moral message, they run an average of 15 to 20 minutes, and they are produced by an agency of the armed forces or by an armed force’s film unit. One such film that has all these characteristics and gives us a clue as to how such films might have been integrated into a soldier’s training is the black-and-white feature You Too Can Get Malaria (1944).²⁴ Produced by Verity, part of the British Directorate of Army Kinematography, this 30-minute film offers the moral tale of Private Bill Smith, a cocky new recruit who is shown all the proper antimalaria measures but disregards them. He and the other recruits are shown a malaria film that is followed by a lecture on how to prevent malaria. Instead of listening, however, Smith doodles a caricature of the medical officer giving the lecture.

Right: "Malaria" (1925) also showed how ponds and streams, potential mosquito breeding places, could be oiled using portable spray tanks. Distribution of the film was discontinued by 1931 and the footage was donated to the U.S. Public Health Service in 1937.

While out in the field, Smith goes out after dusk without repellent and without rolling down his sleeves, spits out his antimalarial mepacrine pill—"It turns my skin yellow," he says with disgust—and sums up his resistance with, "If you’re going to get malaria, you’ll get it no matter what you do!" He then fails his unit by contracting malaria just before the unit moves out on a strategic offensive. While in a malarious fever state, Smith dreams he is put on trial for his negligence and is sentenced by his own conscience. When he awakens, he has come to his senses, and the film ends with a wiser Private Smith telling new recruits about the perils of malaria and how to avoid the disease, not only for one’s own sake but for that of his fellow men.

	ECHOES OF VENEREAL DISEASE FILMS

TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION SCHOLARLY ANALYSES OF PUBLIC... A POWERFUL WEAPON IN... EARLY EFFORTS IN MALARIA... WORLD WAR II AND... ECHOES OF VENEREAL DISEASE... 1946-1961: THE POSTCOLONIAL ERA... A COMPARISON OF 2... 1962-1982: DISILLUSIONMENT AND... 1983-PRESENT: A NEW AGE... CONCLUSION Endnotes

 
There are 2 interesting contextual points common to the films made for the military. The first is the parallel to venereal disease films and the accompanying misogyny and "tough guy image" reflecting what is likely to be part of a young, predominantly male audience. There is a distinct misogynistic tone to Smith’s tale. There are many references to female meddling: Smith mocks the concern of his girlfriend when she implores him to put on his coat and keep warm as he returns to barracks; he sarcastically mimics the female waitress who warns him that the cocoa is piping hot, and angrily asserts, "I’m a soldier not a hothouse rose!" An even closer parallel to the venereal disease films, however, is the evil represented by the malarial mosquito. The narrator stresses that it is the female anopheles mosquito that transmits malaria. There is the subtle, unspoken allusion to the prostitute or "loose" woman who transmits venereal disease in the tone of the narrator when he mentions the female anopheles mosquito.

This tone is repeated in another British film, the 18-minute animated short Borne on Two Wings (1945), made by the British Army Kinematography Service. Set "somewhere in Mangoland," it tells the story of Noffie the Skita, a shapely, sexy "blond" mosquito, no doubt modeled after wartime "pin-up girls" like Betty Grable. After getting pregnant in a brief liaison with a dark-skinned insect, Noffie lays her eggs in a pond. One of her daughters, Anophelina, survives and matures into a beautiful "blond" herself. Hungry for a blood meal, Anophelina bites Sambo, a young native boy infected with the malaria parasite. A "microscopic view" of the parasites is shown, the wicked plasmodia depicted as loose males and females drinking, dancing, and smoking in Sambo’s bloodstream, always to the syncopated rhythms of American jazz music. Anophelina bites Private Atkins while he is kissing an anonymous blond woman by the pond and transfers the malaria parasite to him; soon after, Atkins falls ill and cannot fight. Morality and good health are restored only after Medical Officer Captain Ague institutes a comprehensive malaria prevention campaign that includes daily antimalaria pills for the men, insect repellent and long-sleeved clothing and trousers, well-maintained mosquito nets, and liberal use of insecticides. Vampish Anophelina succumbs to a brief breeding liaison, and both she and her "children" perish because of Captain Ague’s antimosquito initiatives. One could merely change all references from malaria to venereal disease and the tone of the film would remain the same.

The other contextual point is one of style. Many of these films employ a fictional story into which the public health educational information is woven. Films, even public health films, were a form of entertainment for soldiers, and any way of getting the information across was valuable. Daley and Viney cite the unique characteristics of film in combining storytelling as a method of putting information across with morality issues, so obvious in the army films of this period: "Incidents seen on a film impress themselves vividly on the memory, so that the incidents are remembered as though they were actual facts, even when the words are forgotten. . . . The story told by the film has much the same effect in popular education as had the old morality plays by which the medieval churches taught the people."²⁵

In addition to these public health films, there is an interesting subset that make use of animation. Two films made by Walt Disney, The Winged Scourge (1943) and the Spanish-language Insectos que Transmiten Enfermedades (1945),²⁶ as well as Private Snafu Versus Malaria Mike (1944)²⁷ and Borne on Two Wings (1945),²⁸ are brief, animated shorts that show malaria preventive measures, including insecticides and door and window screens. In fact, The Winged Scourge was cited in a Time magazine article with the punning title of "Screen Salesman." The article includes 2 stills from the color film and cites the contemporary opinion of Dr Lowell T. Coggeshall that "the best way to fight malaria is not by drugs but by fighting mosquitoes."²⁹ The article, published in the June 14, 1943, issue, cites Coggeshall’s research in which he concluded that "screens and sprays, would actually omit drugs."³⁰ The article ends with mention of the Disney film, made under the direction of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs³¹ for use throughout Latin America and the United States: "Like Coggeshall, Disney comes out strongly for screens."³² In truth, the film also lauded spraying. It featured the Seven Dwarfs, from the animated Disney classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, both refitting huts with screens and liberally spraying the huts with insecticide.

Although most of the films are malaria propaganda/education features produced by the armed forces, there are documentaries and clinical training films dating from World War II as well.³³ The second of 4 films produced by the Shell International Petroleum Company Limited dates from 1941. A black-and-white motion picture, it included information on the mosquito life cycle as well as control measures.³⁴ This 20-minute film was used to educate Shell employees working in malarious regions. Malaria had, and has, a distinct economic impact: if Shell employees fell ill, there was not only the cost of treatment but the cost of lost worker productivity. Although Peter J. Brown writes that "the risk of malaria simply adds to the overall personal costs of seeking a livelihood,"³⁵ the tone of these corporate-sponsored films echoes that of the military films: if an individual is foolish enough to contract malaria, he or she is "letting down the side" by being unable to work or to perform as a soldier.

Malaria films from this period also include the sound version of the US Department of Agriculture’s 1933 film Mosquitoes, renamed The Mosquito—Public Enemy (1940); the single-reel War on Mosquitoes (1942), produced by the Department of the Northeast, Brazil, which shows the attempt to eradicate Anopheles gambiae³⁶; the 42-minute clinical training film Knowlesi Malaria in Monkeys (1944), made by the Universities of Tennessee and Chicago³⁷; and the 25-minute film Malaria Control in the Kentucky Reservoir (1944),³⁸ produced by the Tennessee Valley Authority and US Public Health Service. Most interesting, however, is the 22-minute Story of DDT. Produced by the British Directorate of Army Kinematography in 1944, this black-and-white documentary is significant as an historical record of the optimism for DDT’s role in eradicating malaria, in both civilian and military contexts. Although first synthesized in 1874, DDT’s value as an insecticide was not discovered until 1939.³⁹

	1946–1961: THE POSTCOLONIAL ERA MEETS DDT

TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION SCHOLARLY ANALYSES OF PUBLIC... A POWERFUL WEAPON IN... EARLY EFFORTS IN MALARIA... WORLD WAR II AND... ECHOES OF VENEREAL DISEASE... 1946-1961: THE POSTCOLONIAL ERA... A COMPARISON OF 2... 1962-1982: DISILLUSIONMENT AND... 1983-PRESENT: A NEW AGE... CONCLUSION Endnotes

 
D. J. Bradley divides the latter half of the 20th century into decades with corresponding contextual "watchwords" for each decade. For Bradley, if the 1940s was the decade of malaria control, the 1950s was the decade of "eradication: attack."⁴⁰ Much of this aggressive tone can be attributed to the apparent success of DDT as well as the eradication strategies carried out in malarious regions like the island of Sardinia. Correspondingly, if more films were made during World War II as a way to get malaria prevention information out to facilitate malaria control, then many of the films made during the 1950s reflected the optimism and single-minded goal of eradication. As Brown said, "Armed with the new weapon of DDT, malariologists began to talk about the eradication of their foe," but "time was of the essence, because the mosquito vectors ultimately would become resistant to the weapon of DDT."⁴¹ So, in 1955, the global program for the eradication of malaria began.⁴²

Many of the films from this period testify to this aggressive enthusiasm.⁴³ After World War II, this is the most productive period for malaria motion pictures. Part of this can be attributed to carryover from World War II; films about malaria control were still being produced by the US Office of Malaria Control, War Area and by the Allied Military Government until 1949, and newsreel footage showed DDT being used in postwar Austria and Berlin and on Japanese civilians. There is also the usual spate of clinical training films and, in 1959, the third offering⁴⁴ in the Shell Film Unit’s Malaria series.⁴⁵ Most interesting, however, are a pair of documentaries on the eradication program in Sardinia and a pair of public health propaganda pieces detailing strategies in 2 different African countries, one still a British colony at the time and the other a newly independent republic.

The Sardinian Project (1949) is the longer of the 2 black-and-white documentaries on this Italian island. During its 36 minutes, it documents the mosquito eradication project undertaken by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration⁴⁶ and ERLAAS (the Italian acronym corresponding to the Regulatory Office for the Eradication of Anopheles Mosquitoes in Sardinia). The core of the project involved 32 000 men who were trained to spray stagnant pools with a 5% solution of DDT in an oil and water emulsion; where possible, to fill in ditches using dynamite and shovels; and, after an interval, to check sprayed areas for surviving mosquito larvae. The initial spraying was completed by February 1948, and later that year officials reported that 99% of mosquitoes on the island had been eradicated. The film, produced by Nucleus Film Unit in partnership with Shell, offers an historical record of the eradication strategy.

Adventure in Sardinia (1950) is, at 20 minutes, an edited,⁴⁷ less detailed and more highly produced version of its predecessor. Produced by Associated British Pathé Productions in association with Nucleus Film Unit, the narration is simpler to understand but far less comprehensive. This is less an instructional film than a sort of "advertising" brief. It is interesting that, as with the Shell Malaria series, footage was recycled and repackaged wherever possible to keep costs down.

	A COMPARISON OF 2 AFRICAN FILMS

TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION SCHOLARLY ANALYSES OF PUBLIC... A POWERFUL WEAPON IN... EARLY EFFORTS IN MALARIA... WORLD WAR II AND... ECHOES OF VENEREAL DISEASE... 1946-1961: THE POSTCOLONIAL ERA... A COMPARISON OF 2... 1962-1982: DISILLUSIONMENT AND... 1983-PRESENT: A NEW AGE... CONCLUSION Endnotes

 
DDT Versus Malaria: A Successful Experiment in Malaria Control (1947), by the Kenya Medical Department, outlines the 1946 campaign to check a malaria epidemic among the Kipsigis tribe in northwest Kenya.⁴⁸ Kenya was still a British colony at that time and would remain so until 1963. This 25-minute, black-and-white documentary is a valuable historical artifact, again highlighting the role of DDT in fighting malaria, as well as a case study in public health filmmaking. It is also interesting as one of the earliest colonial coproductions. British malariologist P. C. C. Garnham, who had been working in Kenya since 1925, appears in the film. Reflecting on the film in 1980, Garnham said, "Apart from the preservation of [our methods] as a record of the experiment we thought the film might be used elsewhere for propaganda purposes where similar work was projected. A certain fictional element runs through the film, in order to make an interesting story for unsophisticated audiences."⁴⁹

A scene from the 1947 Kenyan film, "DDT Versus Malaria: A Successful Experiment in Malaria Control." This film documented the 1946 campaign to check a malaria epidemic among the Kipsigis tribe in northwest Kenya. Courtesy of Wellcome Library for History and Understanding of Medicine, Medical Film and Audio Collections.

The film begins with the effects of malaria on the native population. Workers fall ill and a new plan is needed. The British medical officer of health for the region (Garnham) meets with other British colleagues, including R. B. Heisch from the Medical Research Laboratory in Nairobi, and they decide to use DDT to curb the epidemic. A team of public health workers are sent into the rural areas to convince villagers that spraying their huts with DDT will help stop the disease. When the skeptical tribal headman, Arap Kipkoi, resists DDT as poisonous, the British officer has DDT sprayed on a bowl of porridge and then eats a mouthful to prove DDT is not dangerous to humans. Still resisting, it is only when a Kenyan native, in a British soldier’s uniform, stands up and tells how he has seen DDT’s positive effect that the villagers agree. The film was translated into 6 languages.⁵⁰

Fourteen years later, the Ghanaian Ministry of Health and Department of Social Welfare and Community Development, in cooperation with UNESCO and the Ghana Film Unit, produced The Enemy in the Night (1960). Ghana had achieved independence in 1957, and this is subtly reflected in the tone of the film and in the fact that it is narrated by a native Ghanaian and not a White, British medical officer. The film tells the story of a man who, having survived a bout of malaria, vows to help in its eradication. Our unnamed hero receives training, earns his badge, and goes out into surrounding villages to spray DDT as part of a malaria control crew.

The Ghanaian hero of the 1960 film, "Enemy in the Night", reads about a local mosquito spraying program while recuperating in the hospital from a bout with malaria. Courtesy of Wellcome Library for History and Understanding of Medicine, Medical Film and Audio Collections.

The difference between this film and the earlier Kenyan film is the involvement of native Africans. The ultimate strategy for malaria control was, in the 1947 Kenyan film, decided upon by a small group of White, British researchers and doctors.⁵¹ In the 1960 Ghanaian film, responsibility is taken by native Africans, as symbolized by the shift in narration from Heisch to our hero in the second film. Our Ghanaian hero is part of the global malaria eradication effort, as the logo on the door of the team’s trucks proudly displays; he is a citizen of the world, using the latest technology to make his country a better place to live—not a colonial subject, who must have Western technology explained to him and made to passively accept what "is best for him" by a colonial overseer.

This era of malaria filmmaking also marked the last of the newsreel footage⁵² and the greatest number, to date, of cooperative productions between world agencies/production units and countries where malaria was at its worst. In addition to the films documenting efforts in Sardinia, Kenya, and Ghana, there are also films produced by the following: Documentary Unit, India (A Tiny Thing Brings Death, 1949); the Rhodesian government (Death Leaves the Valley, circa 1950); Department of Information and Press, Brazil/Brazilian Ministry of Education and Health (War on Mosquitoes, 1950; the Englishlanguage remake of the 1942 Portuguese-language original with the same title); and documentary footage of the fight against malaria in Southern Rhodesia, produced by the Central African Film Unit (Federal Spotlight No. 125, 1961).

	1962–1982: DISILLUSIONMENT AND REFLECTION

TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION SCHOLARLY ANALYSES OF PUBLIC... A POWERFUL WEAPON IN... EARLY EFFORTS IN MALARIA... WORLD WAR II AND... ECHOES OF VENEREAL DISEASE... 1946-1961: THE POSTCOLONIAL ERA... A COMPARISON OF 2... 1962-1982: DISILLUSIONMENT AND... 1983-PRESENT: A NEW AGE... CONCLUSION Endnotes

 
As the 1960s gave way to the1970s, there was little good news to document and few ideas on new strategies for combating malaria. Dreams of malaria eradication, still a dim hope in the 1960s, evolved into the nightmare of a resurgence of the disease in the 1970s.⁵³ As Harrison notes, "In India, malaria cases, which were reduced to 50,000 in 1961, soared in 1977 to 30 million or more."⁵⁴

The optimism of the late 1940s and 1950s was replaced by resignation. By 1972, the WHO had declared the global eradication program a failure.⁵⁵ DDT, the mightiest weapon, was soon banned in the United States, and by 1982 "its production was stopped altogether" there⁵⁶; today, it is manufactured only in China and India and used in 22 of the poorest countries to counter malaria.⁵⁷ Eradication efforts dependent upon DDT and topographical changes gave way to antimalarial drugs, insecticides, and public health service campaigns. It became clear that no single solution existed. This is reflected in the relatively low film output for the period. Of the more than 170 films produced since 1912, I have found only 15 films for these 2 decades. This is as low as the period before 1930, when film technology was still evolving and filmmaking was considerably more expensive.

This is an era dominated by short clinical training films⁵⁸ and biographical films⁵⁹ reviewing the lives of malaria researchers. If one had only these films as a record of malaria prevention and research, the key message would be one of refining laboratory techniques—specifically, staining and preparing blood films. The biographical films offer a somber reminder that malaria, once thought under control, was a growing menace. As Coggeshall told interviewer John Z. Bowers in a 1971 filmed interview, "We licked malaria to a standstill" during World War II.⁶⁰

The only other English-language malaria films I have discovered from this period are Malaria Cause and Control (1967) and the WHO’s Too Late Tomorrow (1978). As Garnham wrote in 1980, "the disease had not been eradicated . . . [in Kenya] and we attribute this partial lack of success to two factors. Firstly, the inhabitants of the relatively small, treated zone frequently travelled outside and became infected. Secondly, mosquitoes flew in from the periphery."⁶¹

	1983–PRESENT: A NEW AGE OF GENERAL EDUCATION

TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION SCHOLARLY ANALYSES OF PUBLIC... A POWERFUL WEAPON IN... EARLY EFFORTS IN MALARIA... WORLD WAR II AND... ECHOES OF VENEREAL DISEASE... 1946-1961: THE POSTCOLONIAL ERA... A COMPARISON OF 2... 1962-1982: DISILLUSIONMENT AND... 1983-PRESENT: A NEW AGE... CONCLUSION Endnotes

 
In direct contrast to the previous period, the past 2 decades have been abuzz with malaria film activity, most of the material being longer documentaries aimed at a general television audience. The tone of these films is more somber than that of the post–World War II films, when eradication still seemed possible. As Brown writes:

During the 1980s and 1990s, the problem of malaria throughout the world has been getting worse. Malaria prevalence has increased and the geographical range of the disease, particularly its chloroquine-resistant strains, has expanded. . . . this resurgence reverses the historical trend of decreasing malaria morbidity and mortality over the past fifty years, especially after the global malaria eradication effort in the late 1950s and 1960s [and] the current technological and political-economic contexts throughout the world make the future of malaria control look particularly grim.⁶²

Since 1983, more than 45 English-language films have been produced, the majority by commercial producers such as the British Broadcasting Corporation, Discovery Channel, Horizon, Granada, Channel Four (UK), Thames TV, and London TV. The Shell Film Unit also produced the fourth Malaria (1985) documentary in their series, this time in color.⁶³

Not-for-profit organizations also stepped up their film output. The WHO followed up on their 1978 documentary Too Late Tomorrow with Just Another Day (1992), Do We Still Need to Die of Malaria? (1994), and A Matter of Malaria (1994), as well as 3 clinical training films. The Wellcome Trust sponsored The Wellcome Trust in Thailand: Malaria, Rabies, and Snakebite (1986) and Mosquitoes and Malaria (1988), while Glaxo-Wellcome coproduced The Fight Against Malaria (1996) with South Africa.

The majority of these films are meant to fit into either a half-hour television broadcast or an hour of television time. They often include interviews with people who have survived malaria or friends and relatives of those who did not and show field footage of malarious areas. There is no need for Noffie the Skita or Private Smith. The story is driven by the drama of real people dying of malaria in African hospitals or the testimony of an English member of parliament regarding his brother’s death. Many of these films have dramatic titles, such as Long Night With Lethal Guests (1987), Fatal Latitudes (1993), Dying for a Holiday (1994), and Mosquito Nightmare (2000). Furthermore, more of the world is featured in these longer documentaries. Countries visited include Benin, Brazil, Ghana, India, Kenya, New Guinea, Thailand, and Vietnam.

These films also herald a new age in malaria prevention. Gone are the absolute proclamations of a single eradication strategy, and gone too are boasts of a malaria-free world. These statements are replaced with many of the lessons learned over the past century; namely, malaria control strategies that are tailored to particular regions, often combining long-held measures such as mosquito nets and antimalarial drugs. There is also a greater role for public health education, reflected in the increased film output and wider audience made possible by television broadcasting. People travel to malarious regions more readily because of inexpensive air travel, and they are made to take greater responsibility for their own health.

	CONCLUSION

TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION SCHOLARLY ANALYSES OF PUBLIC... A POWERFUL WEAPON IN... EARLY EFFORTS IN MALARIA... WORLD WAR II AND... ECHOES OF VENEREAL DISEASE... 1946-1961: THE POSTCOLONIAL ERA... A COMPARISON OF 2... 1962-1982: DISILLUSIONMENT AND... 1983-PRESENT: A NEW AGE... CONCLUSION Endnotes

 
Film and video are valuable tools for malaria public health education as well as historical records of malaria research and prevention, but as nonprinted sources they have been neglected all too often. There are historical challenges in the lack of supporting documentation and of surveys that would address the questions of effectiveness and the didactic value of the films. But these omissions do not take away from the films as historical sources; in some cases, they are the most descriptive record of colonial initiatives or antimalarial techniques employed during more optimistic periods, and they are undeniably valuable documentation of the prevailing attitudes toward the possibility of a world without malaria.

	Acknowledgments

 
This paper was researched and written while on a Postdoctoral Fellowship funded by Associated Medical Services/Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine and held at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at Oxford University.

The author would like to acknowledge the generous help of Michael Clark at the Medical Film and Audio Collections of the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine; Toby Haggith and Brad King at the Imperial War Museum; Michele Hiltzik and Dr Darwin H. Stapleton at the Rockefeller Archive Center; Dr Nancy Dosch at the National Library of Medicine; and the archival staff at the British Film Institute. The author would, finally, like to thank Dr Mary Dobson for inspiring me to work on malaria films in the first place.

	Footnotes

 
Peer Reviewed

Accepted for publication December 16, 2002.

	Endnotes

TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION SCHOLARLY ANALYSES OF PUBLIC... A POWERFUL WEAPON IN... EARLY EFFORTS IN MALARIA... WORLD WAR II AND... ECHOES OF VENEREAL DISEASE... 1946-1961: THE POSTCOLONIAL ERA... A COMPARISON OF 2... 1962-1982: DISILLUSIONMENT AND... 1983-PRESENT: A NEW AGE... CONCLUSION Endnotes

 
1. WHO fact sheet "What is malaria?" Available at: http://www.who.int/inf-fs/en/InformationSheet01.pdf. Accessed August 15, 2002.

2. Among the secondary literature on film as historical artifact are Feature Films as History, ed. K. R. M. Short (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981) and The Historian and Film, ed. Paul Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). Among those who have written on medical feature films are Rima D. Apple and Michael W. Apple, "Screening Science," Isis 84 (1993): 750–754, with films reviews on pp. 755–774; Michael Shortland, Medicine and Film: A Checklist, Survey and Research Resource (Oxford: Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, 1989); and Peter E. Dans, Doctors in the Movies: Boil the Water and Just Say Aah (Bloomington, Ill: Medi-Ed Press, 2000).

3. This can be said of DDT Versus Malaria: A Successful Experiment in Malaria Control by the Kenya Medical Department (1946), The Sardinian Project (1949), and Adventure in Sardinia (1950, a shortened version of The Sardinian Project).

4. Venereal disease education films are among the most popular, both in terms of volume of footage as well as historical subject matter. Among those who have written on venereal disease films are Robert Eberwein, Sex Ed: Film, Video, and the Framework of Desire (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999); Susan Lederer and John Parascandola, "Screening Syphilis: ‘Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet’ Meets the Public Health Service," Journal of the History of Medicine 53 (1998): 345–370; and John Parascandola, "VD at the Movies: PHS Films of the 1930s and 1940s," Public Health Reports 111 (1996): 173–175.

5. Among them are Mary J. Dobson, Maureen Malowany, Margaret Humphreys (author of Malaria: Poverty, Race and Public Health in the United States [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2001]), and Ulf Schmidt, whose session at the 1999 meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine was titled "Malaria at the Movies—Rolling Back Malaria on Film!" As the abstract stated, the session was meant to "underline the consistency of the scientific aspects of the malaria message and the cultural adaptations of its production and reception." Clips from the following films were shown: The Mosquito (1941), the animated Disney film later retitled Winged Scourge; the German-language film Feind Malaria (Enemy Malaria; 1942); and DDT Versus Malaria: A Successful Experiment in Malaria Control by the Kenya Medical Department (1946). Widening the topic beyond malaria and public health, there is Timothy Martyn Boon, Films and the Contestation of Public Health in Interwar Britain (PhD dissertation, University of London, 1999) and Martin Pernick, Black Stork: Eugenics and Death of "Defective" Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915 (New York: Oxford, 1996). Pernick brought a copy of the film Black Stork to the 1996 American Association for the History of Medicine meeting in Buffalo, NY. The double capacity conference room was full—an estimated 200 people at a meeting with multiple, concurrent sessions—showing that historians, too, are drawn to film as a medium.

6. The archival documentation on Malaria includes scripts, correspondence, and distribution information. The idea of a Rockefeller Foundation– sponsored malaria film was conceived in 1922. Malaria was the second successful public health feature funded by the International Health Division of the foundation; its makers used lessons learned from the foundation’s phenomenally successful Unhooking the Hookworm (1921). The 2-reel film, which cost $10 523, was a combination of the best features of 2 earlier malaria films, one of which was titled Malaria and the Mosquito. By 1931, the film was deemed to be out of date and copies were no longer being distributed by the foundation. The negatives and titles were donated to the US Public Health Service in 1937.

7. W. Allen Daley and Hester Viney, Popular Education in Public Health (London: H. K. Lewis, 1927), 109.

8. Ibid, 110.

9. Boon, Films and the Contestation of Public Health in Interwar Britain, 43–44. Daley and Viney give the following costs for film production "under more or less easy circumstances—as, for example, illustrating the work of one particular clinic": approximately "1s. 6d. to 2s. 6d. per foot (negative and positive)," where 1000 feet of film equaled about 18 minutes of screen time; Popular Education, 111.

10. Daley and Viney cite many of these production limitations in Popular Education, 111.

11. Boon, Films and the Contestation of Public Health in Interwar Britain, 58.

12. Daley and Viney, Popular Education, 110.

13. In Mosquitoes, Malaria and Man: A History of the Hostilities Since 1880 (London: John Murray, 1978), 1, Gordon Harrison states that malaria was described by Hippocrates.

14. The history of malaria and malaria prevention has been well documented; besides Harrison, Mosquitoes, Malaria and Man, see A. Celli, The History of Malaria in the Roman Campagna (London: John Bale, Sons and Danielson, 1933); R. S. Desowitz, The Malaria Capers (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1991); S. C. Oaks and V. S. Mitchell, Malaria: Obstacles and Opportunities (Washington: National Academy Press, 1991); E. Pampana, Textbook of Malaria Eradication (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963); V. P. Sharma and K. N. M. Mehotra, "Malaria Resurgence in India: A Critical Study," Social Science and Medicine 22 (1986): 835–845; Social Science and Medicine 27 (9) (1993), a special issue devoted entirely to malaria; Parassitologia 41 (1–3) (1999), a monograph-length collection of essays titled "The Malaria Challenge After One Hundred Years of Malariology"; and Malaria: Waiting for the Vaccine, ed. G. A. T. Targett (Chichester, England: John Wiley and Sons, 1991).

15. Interestingly, 2 films, Subsoil Drainage—Malaya (1926) and Nepal—The Unknown (ca. 1928), were amateur efforts. Only 2 organizations, the Rockefeller Foundation and League of Red Cross Societies, made more than one malaria film during this early period. The predominant malaria preventive measures in these early films are mosquito hoods, screens, and clothing that covers the skin, thereby reducing the chance of being bitten and potentially contracting malaria. The Rockefeller Foundation’s Malaria (1925) also includes footage of a man spraying a ditch, presumably with a tank of oil, and another of a man dusting a marshy area, by hand, with Paris green. Although I have not yet found a viewing copy of the film, the Rockefeller Archive Center has 6 black-and-white stills taken from Malaria, including the ones noted (Rockefeller Foundation Photos, Box 19, 100I, Folder 4666—Malaria film, prints from). These prints date from 1923 and 1924. Other malaria films produced in the 1930s include 300 feet of 35-mm footage of Sir Ronald Ross (1930); a pair of American-made silent films, Mosquitoes (1933), produced by the US Department of Agriculture, and Malaria (1934), produced by General Business Films for the Winthrop Chemical Company (New York) and the State Board of Health of Georgia; the clinical training films Microscopic Investigation of Anopheles (1935), The Life of a Mosquito (1935), and The Effect of Oil on Mosquito Larvae (1936), the latter an amateur effort; 2 German-language 35-mm features on the struggle against malaria (both produced in 1937); and a newsreel sequence (1937) in Hebrew, showing insecticide being sprayed and swamps being drained to combat malaria in Cheffar Emek, part of modern-day Israel.

16. I screened this footage at the Imperial War Museum (3 examples of newsreel footage produced by Gaumont, War Office/New Era Film and US Signal Corps in 1916 and 1919, all showing soldiers wearing mosquito hoods) and the British Film Institute (The Mosquito, The War on the Mosquito, the Nepalese amateur feature on the Ross Institute, and the 35-mm footage of Ronald Ross). Both the Imperial War Museum and the British Film Institute have their film archives in London, England.

17. Christine Beadle and Stephen L. Hoffman, "History of Malaria in the United States Naval Forces at War: World War I Through the Vietnam Conflict," Clinical Infectious Diseases 16 (1993): 321.

18. C. W. Hays, "US Army and Malaria Control in World War II," Parassitologia 42 (2000): 49.

19. Beadle and Hoffman, "History of Malaria in the United States Naval Forces," 320. It is important to remember that the United States entered World War II only after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, making these figures even more dramatic.

20. Beadle and Hoffman, "History of Malaria in the United States Naval Forces," 320. They also cite M. E. Condon-Rall’s article, "Allied Co-operation in Malaria Prevention and Control: The World War II Southwest Pacific Experience," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 46 (1991): 493–513.

21. Beadle and Hoffman, "History of Malaria in the United States Naval Forces," 321.

22. Hays, "US Army and Malaria Control," 49. The same quotation can be found in Beadle and Hoffman, "History of Malaria in the United States Naval Forces," 321. Russell, a malariologist, was seconded from the Rockefeller Foundation to become the chief of the Tropical Disease Control Section. Hays outlines how, in October 1942, the US surgeon general of the army set up a new malaria control infrastructure that included malariologists; malaria survey units made up of 2 Sanitary Corps officers, a parasitologist and an entomologist who "supervised eleven enlisted men" doing parasitological and entomological surveys; and malaria control units made up of a sanitary engineer and 11 enlisted men who carried out mosquito control projects. By April 1945, there were, Hays notes, 54 malariologists, 63 malaria survey units, and 143 malaria control units throughout the Caribbean, Central Africa, China–Burma–India, Europe, the Middle East, and the South Pacific and Southwest Pacific; "US Army and Malaria Control," 49.

23. Other films in this period are newsreel pieces, including The Enemy Japan (1943), part of the March of Time series; Warwork News No. 49 (1944), by British Paramount News, showing German prisoners of war’s blood being tested for the malaria parasite; British Movietone News (October 19, 1944); War Pictorial News No. 219 (1945), showing DDT being sprayed; Welt im Film No. 10 (1945), part of the Allied Military Government’s newsreel series, which shows delousing with DDT; and The March of Time, 10th Year, No. 13 (1945), produced by Time Inc (US), a brief bit of footage showing malaria research being carried out at Hebrew University.

24. The film is dated June 4, 1942, but catalogued as 1944 in the Imperial War Museum, London, England.

25. Daley and Viney, Popular Education, 110.

26. This is one of a series of Spanish-language films, made by Disney, for the Office of the Co-ordinator of Inter-American Affairs, a post held by Nelson Rockefeller at the time. The 9-minute, color film outlines how flies, mosquitoes, and ticks spread disease as well as showing how to destroy all 3 vectors with improved sanitation, water drainage, and boiling water for clothes washing.

27. This film is one in a series of 28 animated shorts featuring the soldier’s Everyman, Private Snafu. Private Snafu Versus Malaria Mike was produced by Chuck Jones, who developed the character of Snafu from an idea by renowned Hollywood director Frank Capra. Capra was head of the Armed Forces Motion Picture Unit, which was set up in 1942. Col Capra decided to use animation for informational films, and the Snafu series was produced by some of the best animators, including Jones, Ted Geisel (Dr Seuss), Friz Frelang, and Bob Clampett. In this film, Malaria Mike, "alias Amos Quito," tries to bite Snafu but is thwarted by Snafu’s clothing, mosquito repellent, and bed netting. Malaria Mike finally hits his target when Snafu sticks his bare bottom outside the bed netting. The short ends with the message that the army offers men everything they need to ward off malaria: Atabrine, GI repellent, and "good old fashioned horse sense! Wish I’d used them," laments the "dead" Snafu.

28. Borne on Two Wings uses color plates and limited movement of elements combined with camera movement, subtitles, and music to move the story along. Although it is not animated in the same way as the Disney films—it uses hundreds of individual animation cells—I include it in this group because it does not use actors or real images.

29. "Screen Salesman," Time, June 14, 1943, 46.

30. Ibid, 48.

31. This is another way that Rockefeller interests manifested themselves in malaria filmmaking.

32. "Screen Salesman," 48. One of the 2 images accompanying the article shows "Happy" the dwarf screwing in a screen on a door (p. 46).

33. There are, of the malaria films I have found to date, 12 films or film clips for which a date is unknown. One is titled Malaria Discipline, and only reel 4 is kept at the Imperial War Museum film archives in London, England. The others are part of a list of public health films found at the Rockefeller Archive Center (RF, RG 1 A83, 100, Films 1941–45, Box R 1996, list of films on various public health topics, "VI. Mosquitoes, Malaria, & Malaria Control," 16–24) and include How the Mosquito Spreads Disease (16-mm, single-reel, black-and-white silent film); Malaria in New Mexico (2-reel silent film); Stung! By Amos Quito (Mosquito) (16-mm, black-and-white silent film); and 8 state health department–sponsored or private company–produced films dealing with mosquito breeding places and mosquito control by drainage and screening. The states involved were Alabama (3 films listed), California (2), Georgia (1), and New Jersey (2).

34. The first Shell Malaria film was made in 1931. A viewing copy of this film has yet to surface. Another film produced in the 1930s, also titled Malaria, is listed as being made "about 1939," and the distributor is said to be the "Dutch Shell Oil Co., office in New York City." The abstract for this 1939 film states that "this picture is one of the best general pictures yet produced on the general topic of malaria" and goes on to cite the "excellent scientific supervision," "particularly good" 3-dimensional animation, and "sequences on mosquito oviposition, and certain humorous incidents add the proper flavour of humanity. . . . There is, naturally, a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm about paris green as a larvicide. . ." (Rockefeller Archive Center [RAC], RF, RG 1 A83, 100, Films 1941–45, Box R 1996, list of films on various public health topics, "VI. Mosquitoes, Malaria, & Malaria Control," 22). This 16-mm single reel with sound may be an edited version of the 1931 Shell Malaria film, the 1941 film, or a separate film altogether, hence I choose to count the 1941 film as the definitive second Shell film.

35. Peter J. Brown, "Culture and the Global Resurgence of Malaria," in The Anthropology of Infectious Disease: International Health Perspectives, ed. Marcia C. Inhorn and Peter J. Brown (London: Gordon and Breach, 2000), 131–132.

36. The original soundtrack is said to be "probably in Portuguese," and "Every student of malariology ought to see this film from the standpoint of being impressed with the power of malaria to overwhelm a population. . . ." (RAC, RF, RG 1 A83, 100, Films 1941–45, Box R 1996, list of films on various public health topics, "VI. Mosquitoes, Malaria, & Malaria Control," 18). I have seen a 1950 English-language copy of this film and can confirm its value as an historical record of the impact of the disease (14 000 to 20 000 died in the first 6 months of 1938 in the Ceara and Rio Grande do Norte regions of Brazil) and the prevention strategy employed (more than 4000 employed at the height of the eradication program, which relied mostly on spraying Paris green—288 tons used in 2 years).

37. The list of malaria films in the Rockefeller Foundation files cites the production date as 1942. It also lists a subtitle for this film: "Microscopic Pathological Circulatory Physiology of Rhesus Monkeys During Acute Plasmodium knowlesi Malaria"; it gives the authors as Drs Warren K. Stratman-Thomas, Theodore S. Eliot, and Melvin H. Knisley and Mr Edward H. Black. All but 3 scenes are done through a microscope (RAC, RF, RG 1 A83, 100, Films 1941–45, Box R 1996, list of films on various public health topics, "VI. Mosquitoes, Malaria, & Malaria Control," 22–23).

38. There is an earlier, longer film made by the Health and Safety Department of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Produced in 1941, Malaria Control in the Tennessee Valley runs 40 minutes and is in color. It was said to give "a detailed picture of the methods used by the TVA to control mosquitoes and combat malaria . . . especially as it relates to impounded waters." (RAC, RF, RG 1 A83, 100, Films 1941–45, Box R 1996, list of films on various public health topics, "VI. Mosquitoes, Malaria, & Malaria Control," 21).

39. For a summary of the history of DDT, see D. H. Stapleton, "The Dawn of DDT and Its Experimental Use by the Rockefeller Foundation in Mexico, 1943–1952," Parassitologia 40 (1998): 149–150. Regarding use of DDT in Italy, see also Stapleton, "Technology and Malaria Control, 1930–1960: The Career of Rockefeller Foundation Engineer Frederick W. Knipe," Parassitologia 42 (2000): 65.

40. D. J. Bradley, "Malaria—Whence and Whither?" in Malaria: Waiting for the Vaccine, 20. The chart (Table 4) depicts the 1940s ("Control"), 1950s ("Eradication: Attack"), 1960s ("Eradication: Consolidation"), 1970s ("Resurgence"), 1980s ("Chaos"), and 1990s ("Hope"). Bradley’s table is also reproduced in M. J. Dobson, M. Malowany, and D. H. Stapleton, "Editorial," Parassitologia 42 (2000): 3.

41. Brown, "Culture and the Global Resurgence of Malaria," 127.

42. Ibid, 127. As Brown explains, the global eradication program was based on the use of larvicides and insecticides throughout the entire world, except sub-Saharan Africa, at a cost of approximately $519 million over the first 5 years. The original vision was that the program would take 8 years, ending in 1966. Brown writes that "throughout the 1960s malaria eradication campaigns resulted in impressive declines in malaria morbidity" despite technical and administrative problems and no provision being made for further scientific research (pp. 127–128).

43. The enthusiasm and optimism is also reflected in the titles of contemporary works such as P. F. Russell’s Man’s Mastery of Malaria (London: Oxford University Press, 1955).

44. Both the 1941 and 1959 versions of Shell’s Malaria were black and white and 20 minutes long. The 1941 version was divided into 3 sections: Parasite, Carrier, and Control. By 1959, the third section had been changed and a fourth section added: Parasite, Carrier, Weapons, and Eradication. Where possible, footage from the 1941 version was reused in the later film; making a film using recycled footage from a previous version was a cost-effective investment in employee health.

45. Shell produced or coproduced at least 2 other films in this period: The Sardinian Project (1949) was a coproduction with ERLAAS, and there is also 83 feet of malaria footage on reel 1 of a feature titled The Rival World (1955), held at the British Film Institute in London, England. Interestingly, Standard Oil Co (NJ), a Rockefeller-owned oil company, also produced a film, Medical Service for Industry (1954), that includes malaria footage.

46. Renowned documentary filmmaker Paul Rotha, in Documentary Film (New York: Hastings House, 1970), tells how the first United Nations agency to sponsor films directly was the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration: "As soon as the war ended and the United Nations organization established on a firm basis, a central Films Division was set up in New York within the U.N. Department of Public Information." He goes on to explain that "the purpose of the programme was to contribute a number of internationally valid films, and at the same time stimulate individual countries to further production." Drawing from this example, Rotha cites Adventure in Sardinia as one of many joint enterprise productions produced under the auspices of the Economic Co-operation Administration’s film project.

47. The Sardinian Project lists renowned documentary filmmaker Arthur Elton as producer and Jack Chambers and W. Suschitzy as directors. Adventure in Sardinia gives Elton and Chambers production and direction credits and adds Peter Baylis to that duo. Adventure also adds Maurice Harley as editor, no doubt acknowledging his role in trimming down and repackaging the original 1949 film.

48. Malariologist P. C. C. Garnham reflected on the epidemic years later: "A severe epidemic of malaria affected the district in 1946, with the exception of the DDT-treated zone, where only nine deaths thought to be due to malaria occurred, as compared with 110 in the untreated control area. After spraying, the parasite rate was reduced by 50 per cent and the anopheline (A. gambiae) density by 99 per cent in the treated area." Garnham, "DDT Versus Malaria, Kenya 1946—Commentary on a Film," in Health in Tropical Africa During the Colonial Period, ed. E. E. Sabben-Clare, D. J. Bradley, and K. Kirkwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 64.

49. Garnham, "DDT Versus Malaria, Kenya 1946," 65. Among the truths that were fictionalized was the fact that it was the tribal headman’s wife who died from malaria; in the film, this was changed to a sick child who recovered.

50. The English-language version is narrated by Heisch and includes a contextually strange soundtrack with the tune Glow Worm being played during the porridge scene.

51. The group that appeared in the film were Garnham, Heisch, entomologist J. O. Harper, team leader of the Division of Insect-Borne Diseases R. B. Highton, and Dr Bartlett, medical officer of the Kenya Medical Department; Garnham, "DDT Versus Malaria, Kenya 1946," 65.

52. Newsreels were dying out because of the growing popularity of television as a way of disseminating news, particularly in North America.

53. This is D. J. Bradley’s viewpoint. The 1960s were the decade of "Eradication: Consolidation" and the 1970s the decade of "Resurgence," as reproduced in Dobson et al., "Editorial," Parassitologia 42 (2000): 3.

54. Harrison, Mosquitoes, Malaria and Man, 1. Harrison, on page 254, says that 1977 estimates put the number of recorded cases of malaria in India at between 30 million and 50 million.

55. R. S. Desowitz, Table 1, "The Malaria Vaccine: Seventy Years of the Great Immune Hope," Parassitologia 42 (2000): 175.

56. Brown, "Culture and the Global Resurgence of Malaria," 129. In 1991, DDT was still being produced in India, Indonesia, and Italy as well as Mexico; Pesticides News 40 (June 1998): 18. Today, use of DDT is completely banned in at least 26 countries and severely restricted in 12 others; Pesticides News 40 (June 1998): 19.

57. It is reportedly only manufactured today in China and India, specifically to control malaria; "Doing It Without DDT," 2, available at http://www.inforchangeindia.org/toxictours09.jsp, accessed December 3, 2002. A report from the WHO states that "twenty-two of the world’s poorest countries rely on DDT"; "Reducing Reliance on DDT" brochure, 2, available at www.who.org, accessed December 3, 2002.

58. These are all American-made f