National Malaria Eradication Program

History

Plasmodium vivax reached North America with British settlers, while Plasmodium falciparum arrived through enslaved Africans. Agricultural expansion in the North, including forest clearing and swamp drainage, reduced mosquito breeding areas. In parts of the South, rice cultivation increased breeding habitat. The 1890 US census recorded 880 thousand deaths, with 2.1 percent attributed to malaria; rates ranged from 0.2 percent in Minnesota and Wyoming to 10.6 percent in Arkansas. By the 1930s malaria was concentrated in 13 southeastern states. In 1940 the US Department of War asked the Public Health Service to organize public health activities near military facilities, mostly in the South. In spring 1941 the PHS assigned chief malariologist Louis L. Williams, Jr. as liaison to the Fourth Service Command in Atlanta. Early in 1942 the PHS funded an independent malaria control program for military installations and war industries in 15 southeastern states and the Caribbean, called Malaria Control in War Areas (MCWA), led by Williams. MCWA focused on larvicide, starting with Paris green, then diesel oil, and DDT from 1944. From 1942 it was a cooperative effort among federal, state, and local health agencies. The CDC's first director, Justin M. Andrews, was also Georgia's chief malariologist. CDC headquarters were in Atlanta partly because malaria was locally endemic, located on the sixth floor of the Volunteer Building on Peachtree Street. With an annual budget of about $1 million, roughly 59 percent of personnel worked on mosquito abatement and habitat control. Among 369 employees, the main jobs were entomology and engineering.