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According to David Fidler, the governance of infectious diseases evolved from the mid-nineteenth to the twenty-first century as a series of institutional arrangements: the International Sanitary Regulations (non-interference and disease control at borders), the World Health Organization vertical programs (malaria and smallpox eradication campaigns), and a post-Westphalian regime standing beyond state-centrism and national interest. But can international public health be reduced to such a Westphalian image? We scrutinize three strategies that brought health borders into prominence: pre-empting weak states (eastern Mediterranean in the nineteenth century); preventing the spread of disease through nation-building (Macedonian public health system in the 1920s); and debordering the fight against epidemics (1920-1921 Russian-Polish war and the Warsaw 1922 Sanitary Conference). Resumo Segundo David Fidler, a gestão de doenças infecciosas entre meados do século XIX e e o XXI guiou-se por uma série de acordos institucionais: Regulamento Sanitário Internacional (não interferência e controle de doenças em fronteiras), programas verticais da OMS (campanhas de erradicação da malária e varíola), e posicionamento pós-vestefaliano além do estado-centrismo e interesse nacional. Mas pode a saúde pública internacional ser reduzida à tal imagem vestefaliana? Examinamos três estratégias que destacaram as fronteiras sanitárias: prevenção em estados vulneráveis (Mediterrâneo oriental, século XIX); prevenção à disseminação de doenças via construção nacional (sistema público de saúde macedônico, anos 1920); remoção de fronteiras no combate às epidemias (guerra polaco-soviética, 1920-1921 e Conferência Sanitária de Varsóvia, 1922).

We present here the proceedings of the 5th seminar on emerging infectious diseases, held in Paris on March 22nd, 2016, with seven priority proposals that can be outlined as follows: encourage research on the prediction, screening and early detection of new risks of infection; develop research and surveillance concerning transmission of pathogens between animals and humans, with their reinforcement in particular in intertropical areas (“hot-spots”) via public support; pursue aid development and support in these areas of prevention and training for local health personnel, and foster risk awareness in the population; ensure adapted patient care in order to promote adherence to treatment and to epidemic propagation reduction measures; develop greater awareness and better education among politicians and healthcare providers, in order to ensure more adapted response to new types of crises; modify the logic of governance, drawing from all available modes of communication and incorporating new information-sharing tools; develop economic research on the fight against emerging infectious diseases, taking into account specific driving factors in order to create a balance between preventive and curative approaches.

The concept of global health security underpins the current framework for global preparedness and response to emerging infectious diseases. (1-5) The Global Health Security Agenda--a collaboration between governments--was launched in 2014, aiming to make our interconnected world safe from infectious disease threats. The governments involved in the Global Health Security Agenda focus on strengthening their countries' capacities for detection, response and prevention. (6) In the context of public health emergencies, the Agenda has received financial and political support from international organizations and almost 50 countries. (6) However, there is tension between the aims of global health security and governments' mandate to ensure national security. The 1994 United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Report first introduced the concept of human security, referring to security of citizens as individuals rather than that of the states in which they live. We posit that the use of the term global health security can have a negative unintended effect on the ultimate goal of improving health for all. There are three reasons why this term potentially privileges the security of the state rather than the security of individuals. First, global health security, in its current use, is largely focused on protecting high-income countries against public health threats coming from low- and middle-income countries. (8) Ebola virus, Marburg, Zika virus, dengue, chikungunya, Riff Valley and Lassa fevers, originated in low--and middle-income countries. If the Agenda is used to prioritize global health risk depending on the origin of infections, resource allocation may become even more skewed towards high-income settings. To ensure that a health security agenda is an integral part of national and foreign policy of each country, political attention and coordination between national ministries is needed as well as support from the national security budget. Second, global health security tends to emphasize disease containment to protect national security rather than the prevention of future local outbreaks. Disease containment is common practice in the control of emerging infectious diseases. A national security perspective often results in unilateral, neo-colonial and/or short-term solutions designed to protect national borders. For example, many countries and airline companies imposed travel restrictions during the 2013-2016 Ebola virus disease outbreak in western Africa, contrary to World Health Organization recommendations. (9) Third, we argue that respect for human rights and values such as equity and solidarity should underlie each national security agenda. Such values are consistent with the motives of many people who provide health services in public health emergencies. Health security agendas should aim to build resilience to future outbreaks of infectious diseases, and require a long-term systems approach based on surveillance and national health system strengthening. Protecting the world from infectious disease threats requires that national governments share the responsibility of serving those most in need, wherever they live. We believe that the concept of global health security should be expanded to include solidarity and sustainability. …

International audience

Besides industrialization, with its rapid economic growth, and urbanization, with its disruption of environmental health, did the advances made in social medicine also depend on the relation between health and development in the more traditional economies of eastern and southern Europe? In the 1920s, countries in this region strongly advocated rural health, and this had a strong impact in international public health circles. The diverging uses of the concept of social medicine by the Belgian, Rene Sand, and the Yugoslav, Andrija Stampar, are examined. Despite their common attitude towards private medicine and their shared intellectual background, these two eminences in social medicine worked out their own orientations. For Sand, social medicine had more to do with the family and workplace, whereas, for Stampar, the village was the ultimate target of health programmes. Health education thus took on different meanings for the two men. For the first, it entailed advertisements, films, and the means of propaganda used by US government agencies and philanthropies, whereas, for the second, it took a populist turn that entailed 'folklonzing' public health through patriotic songs, customs, and folkways. Given this East-West divide, how did the strategies based on rural health affect the worldwide development of social medicine in the 1930s?

Food safety is an ever more conflictive issue receiving media attention. “The increased activity of interest groups, the impact of the Common Agricultural Policy and changes in the retail economy have combined to transform [a relatively closed] food policy community into an issue network”.1 This account of recent changes lacks the historical dimension that might endow it with meaning. It is hardly appropriate to describe the current situation as a reawakening after a long slumber. In France at least, complaints about food safety voiced in numerous newspaper articles echo enduring concerns and a permanent sense of alarm.2 In 1957, Demain ran a catalogue of food scares: industrial bread causing eczema; wine adulterated with sulphur anhydride (for safe transportation); eggs and milk feared by doctors to be toxic (because chickens were being fed with chemicals or fish, and cattle with ground up rubbish); and filthy conditions on cattle and poultry farms. Much the same sort of list could have been drawn up early in the century during meetings of the Societe Scientifique d'Hygiene Alimentaire (created in 1904), or run in the press following passage of the 1905 Food Adulteration Act, or printed in popular pamphlets such as Dr Raffray's Le peril alimentaire (1912). As the Common Market took shape in the 1960s, repeated articles in the daily newspapers relentlessly focused on the issue of food and public health. In France, arguments were continually framed in the language of the 1905 act.3 The present media focus on this issue is not, therefore, something new. But what about the politicization of food safety? When, given an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, the British government suddenly considered, in March 2001, vaccinating potentially exposed animals instead of slaughtering them, this unprecedented policy switch sparked debate. According to the New York Times, “the discussion [was] laden with scientific dispute, political maneuvring, national pride and the bottom-line question of the long-term economic impact of vaccination on powerful farm lobbies”.4 Since public authorities could not effectively handle the outbreak, a policy field became a politicized issue instead of remaining an ordinary, functional matter of regulation. But was this so very exceptional? Or, on the contrary, had it often happened before? The issue of food safety brings food production techniques and epidemiology face-to-face with culture and politics in a context where national administrations no longer exercise full control. Policy-making about food safety does not just fuel conflicts of interest; it also feeds on radically incommensurable ideas about food, since arguments about technical standards may be grounded in divergent values and opinions about the degree and type of interdependence between values and facts. Standards thus become agonistic in that experts can use them as strategic arguments. This might explain why central authorities have less impact on defining food safety policies than border clashes between national public opinions and conflicting influences and interests—why international public health may well be called “agonistic sanitarianism”.5 Although focusing on food policy through the lens of international relations risks blurring domestic factors in full or in part, it will help us to glimpse the critical role of values in this policy field. Explanations might be formulated in line with the frequently drawn distinction between “high” and “low foreign policy”—the former about national security matters, the latter about secondary issues. This distinction, however, separates all sorts of technical issues from foreign relations in general. True, public health per se did not encroach on the domain of high foreign policy, apart from the significant exception of the western powers' struggle against epidemics in central and eastern Europe in the aftermath of the First World War. At the end of the nineteenth century, the “pork war” (an episode discussed hereafter) between the United States and certain European countries provides us with another exception. “Not even the Spanish-American War”, commented James Cassedy, “nor the question of Samoa seemed to disturb United States–German relations as much as the problem of German restrictions on imports of American pork”.6 Public health is all the more likely to interfere with “high foreign policy” when countries are not committed to general rules for dealing with such issues in their own right. For this commitment to be made, an orderly procedure—including a set of sanctions—for discussing grievances and settling misunderstandings among nations must be worked out. Ultimately, such rules and procedures signal that nations recognize that their actions in public health are a matter of mutual concern and not merely of domestic policy.7 When did this recognition arise in Europe? How strongly have nations adhered to general rules for food safety? What factors have prevented them from adopting a single orderly procedure for dealing with food safety? Let us examine these three questions.8

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the link between swamps (miasmas) and fevers appeared to be well established. The study of malaria was thus based on typical malarial landscapes—the marshes—in North America and Western Europe and on the cycles and intensity of transmission characteristic of Plasmodium vivax (tertian fever). However, this model could not explain the history of infection in other regions of the world where mosquitoes reproduced, not in marshes, but in mountain streams, tidal floodplains or hoof-print size puddles. The subject of this book resembles first of all a geo-history devoted to retracing the shifting distribution of malaria, a geo-history which borrows from these earlier authors on malaria. Secondly, it resembles an epidemiological history, retracing, over a very long period, the transformations in the nature and meaning of the infection in the course of its intercontinental migrations from Africa to Europe, then to the Americas, until the disappearance of malaria from the temperate zone. It is an historical epidemiology which quite logically takes an ecological perspective. Here, the units of analysis are the three main zones of malarial infection. The first, dominated by P. falciparum, is geographically limited to Africa. Mortality there is essentially among children under five years old. In the zone where vivax predominated, attacks occurred primarily in the summer. Mortality was rarely above one per cent: “Vivax was the great debilitator, not the great killer.” The zone of mixed infections was located between the first two, from southern China to the Mediterranean basin, by way of the subcontinent. Although mortality and morbidity were lower than in the zone where falciparum predominated, they could none the less reach very high levels when populations had no acquired immunity. Ecological history and cultural history are closely intertwined. Humanity’s burden identifies three main types of correlation between cultures and landscapes. The first was a pattern of avoidance (East Africa, the Balkans, Central and South America) where populations of the high plains avoided all contact with lowlands during the transmission season. More generally, in agricultural societies, the elites often stayed away from zones of malaria where workers of low social status were concentrated (slaves, serfs, untouchables). The second type was the opposition—disputed by some—between nomads and agriculturalists, the former keeping well away from the latter during the season when the mosquito bit. A third kind opposed agriculturalists and the forest people who remained unscathed by any contamination. By extending slash and burn cultivation (yams in tropical Africa, maize and manioc in the Brazilian forest), agriculturalists spread the infestation. Far from being isolated through disposition, “primitive” people were obliged to withdraw to the deepest forest because of the disease introduced by the agriculturalists. In all these cases, epidemiology and ethnicity were interwoven. The book is divided into two main sections organized according to an eminently Braudelian plan. The first section covers a very long history of the infection on the three continents. The second, with much shorter undulations, retraces the successes, but more often the failures, of science and of malaria policy as played out in eradication campaigns—in reality the “control” of transmission—from the end of the nineteenth century. A final chapter concentrates on the efforts in Africa with which, for better or worse, the name of the WHO is associated. A long chapter on treatment (quinine, opium) and on the “accelerators” of the diffusion of infection in the nineteenth century (migrations, colonization, transportation, war, drought and famine) separates the two sections. Humanity’s burden is testimony of a twofold success. The work offers a historico-epidemiological synthesis devoid of unnecessary technical language on a serious pathology of utmost importance in the world today. Epidemiologists, economists, anthropologists and students can draw on it with considerable benefit. It is also a very convincing essay on global history, both from inside (explaining the persistence of the virulence of the infection by studying the connections between different local epidemiologies) and from outside (integrating the advances in the social and natural sciences). The book is enriched by an abundant bibliography.

International audience; Healthcare workers (HCWs) can be an important source of transmission of influenza to patients and family members, and their well-being is fundamental to the maintenance of healthcare services during influenza outbreaks and pandemics. Unfortunately, studies have shown consistently low levels of compliance with influenza vaccination among HCWs, a finding that became particularly pronounced during recent pandemic vaccination campaigns. Among the variables associated with vaccine acceptance in this group are demographic factors, fears and concerns over vaccine safety and efficacy, perceptions of risk and personal vulnerability, past vaccination behaviours and experience with influenza illness, as well as certain situational and organisational constructs. We report the findings of a review of the literature on these factors and highlight some important challenges in interpreting the data. In particular, we point out the need for longitudinal study designs, as well as focused research and interventions that are adapted to the most resistant HCW groups. Multi-pronged strategies are an important step forward in ensuring that future influenza vaccination campaigns, whether directed at seasonal or pandemic strains, will be successful in ensuring broad coverage among HCWs.

International audience; Influenza epidemics occur regularly and prediction of their conversion to pandemics and their impact is difficult. Coordination of efforts on a global scale to control or reduce the impact is fraught with potential for under and overreaction. In light of the 1956 pandemic and more recently the SARS and H1N1 pandemics, the public health community took steps toward strengthening global surveillance and a coordinated response in keeping with the continuing memory of the tragedy seen in 1918. The scientific, professional, and technical resources of the 21st century are now advanced far beyond those then available. The H1N1 pandemic which commenced in 2009 progressed differently than predicted; its course was difficult to predict with any degree of certainty. Public responses to national immunization programs against the H1N1 virus have been weak. International movement of diseases can lead to creation of new endemic areas and continuous spread such as that which happened with West Nile Fever and Chikungunya. The lessons learned and the public and political responses to each actual or threatened pandemic will serve public health well in dealing with future challenges

This dossier springs from a meeting of the network «Health in the Interwar years» held in Granada in April 2007. This international network, which it is loosely organised around the electronic list of distribution maintained by the spiritful dedication of Iris Borowy, from Rostock University in Northern Germany, had a first presentation meeting in 2003, which produced a book on Facing Illness in Troubled Times. Health in Europe in the Interwar Years, 1918-1939 1. There we tried to grasp the actual health experiences beyond political shifts and organizational changes of the time, taking a view on the forming of health statistics that remained as main quantitative sources for the period. This allowed for a nuanced approach to the European past and contributed to the better understanding of the several case-studies (on Yugoslavia, Spain, Macedonia, Germany or Palestine, among others) presented. The book produced a nitid view of health as becoming a firstclass political problem in the interwar years, full of questionings, rich in promises and burgeoning professional administrations, a space worth of further analysis. At a next informal gathering in Paris, at the occasion of the 2005 Conference of the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health, we decided that time was ripe for a second scientific meeting dealing with «Crises as opportunities for health?». We aimed to discuss aspects and initiatives of future developments that revealed themselves through the diverse critical situations lived during the interwar years in Europe, and their interconnecting links, by means of a plurality of singular, nation —or institution— centred studies. A selection of papers presented at the Granada meeting have been collected here, including a further one prepared independently that has been added because of its closeness to our subject. Thus, we present papers on Britain, Norway, Greece and Spain (two), as well as one on a Jewish organization in Russia and/or Poland and a further one on the activities of the main institutional international actor in public health of the time, the League of Nations Health Organisation.

In the nineteenth century, major epidemics raised border-related issues among people and animals. Cholera? The border between East and West. Cattle plague? The border between Tsarist Russia and Europe. Malaria? The frontier of modernization in the Balkans. The modern state has defined itself by its borders, whose complexity is a function of the state having become more complicated and organized.1 Public health has actively participated in this increasing complexity. Quarantines, international health regulations and delousing stations altered certain state’s relations with other states, as well as with its own society. France in 1822, Texas in 1910, or even the Germany of victorious bacteriology, are examples of modern health institutions spreading inward from the borders rather than outward from the center.2

Too little attention has been paid to the fact that the birth of scientific racism is contemporaneous with two other theories to which it is closely related: totemism and hysteria. All three follow the same themes and the same evolution. Hysteria moves man (woman in this case) closer to animality, in exactly the same way as totemism does. Racism dwells on external or internal accidents of fate (mental retardation, heredity, alcoholism) supposedly responsible for significant differences between social groups. As with hysteria, racism makes use of sexual determinism and, as with totemism, it is interested in physiological paternity. It is this metaphor for nature, or this “parti de la nature”, as Claude Levi-Strauss calls it, a veritable “touchstone enabling the segregation of the savage from the civilized within culture itself”, which is addressed by some twenty contributions to this pioneering volume, half emanating from Central and Eastern European researchers. The little-understood contribution of local eugenicists, their concept of the nation and their role as experts, are explored by these writers through the history of the sciences, medicine, the social sciences and through cultural and political history. And more importantly, they examine the particular way in which German, British or French eugenics, not to mention Italian biotypology, were “redesigned” in order to adapt them to new contexts. The editors tell us that in Central and Eastern Europe, eugenics and national racism were the cornerstones used in building the nation and the state. Far from giving in to the siren call of the forces of reaction, this “parti de la nature” brought together two modern and highly toxic substances: eugenics and ultra nationalism. And doubtless the rise, in the wake of a Nazified Germany, of racist nationalisms during the 1930s in Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, and the racist rantings of certain Croatian ideologues also broadcast the familiar and sinister message. But was this radicalism in speech really useful as ideological cement for the State? Herein lies one of the important issues addressed by this book. In Estonia for example, the ideological mountain inspired by Germany gave birth in fact to a mouse “in the Scandinavian model”. Everywhere, people were getting carried away: sterilization! legal castration! eugenic abortion! And what next? In Hungary before Horthy (1920), eugenics was merely a chapter in social medicine; in Bulgaria, where eugenicist extremism was inspired by the exterminating lunacy of a Binet-Sangle, the State adopted a marriage law of Nazi inspiration but with only the prenuptial certificate surviving; in Poland, where eugenicists took over the Ministry of Health created in 1918 (abolished six years later), the church and indifference on the part of politicians aborted the adoption of the medical examination prior to marriage; again in Poland, the same Jewish physicians who were infatuated with social Darwinism (under the pretext that eugenics would have secured an excellent defense against assimilation) nevertheless lined up behind a proposal for a very moderate programme of preventive and positive eugenics. The conclusion is unavoidable: radical views produce modest achievements. The stilted method of examining countries individually runs the risk of simply finding repetitions. Yet, in this case, some good comes out of this shortcoming. Indeed, it is clear that everywhere and in each case, “eugenics has been characterized by a discrepancy between the utopian character of its ambitions and the actual possibilities for the realization of its projects”. Everywhere, except in Vienna. Of course, Vienna is Catholic; the Vienna of the Standstaat could not have gone beyond the prenuptial certificate, “modest instrument for the relatively pain-free integration of eugenics in the ‘Catholic milieu’”. And neither could socialist Vienna, which would never have gone over to the other side of the mirror. Still, long ready for the worst, thanks in particular to its university chair in anthropology, Nazi Vienna would not have such scruples following the Anschluss. From 1938, the innovative creation of a Department for Policy on Heredity and Race marked the beginning of the large-scale implementation of Austrian racial policy. This included the register of heredity, bringing together 767,000 files in March 1944, 6000 sterilizations (an estimation) between 1940 and 1945, 3200 people transported and euthanized at the Steinhof (the largest psychiatric hospital in the city) in the summer of 1940, 1850 children incarcerated at the Spielgelgrund, 789 of whom were killed by poison, lack of care, hunger or infection. Nothing escaped the Viennese. Bertrand Russell believed that “what stands in the way (of introducing eugenic measures) is democracy”. The author of Marriage and morals (1920) certainly did not know that in 1919, opposed to German racial hygiene, a democratic and progressive eugenics became the “official doctrine” of the newly formed Czechoslovakian Republic. And it was in Prague, starting in 1933, that the opposition of German-speaking biologists to Hitlerian racism was organized.

The coming of age of international health history is attested by the increasing number of scholars studying the relationship in various countries between US philanthropies and science and medicine, investigating global organizations, or embarking on such topics as borders and health. Latin America, Russia, Europe and India have recently been the main areas under scrutiny. Anne-Emanuelle Birn's excellent and highly readable Marriage of convenience is one more example of the growing success of this research programme, initially developed in 1991 at a conference on ‘Science, Philanthropy and Latin America’ sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and Indiana University Center on Philanthropy (see Marcos Cueto, Missionaries of science, 1994). The book under review pays special attention to the local reception of and response to US philanthropy. It may be read as a history of Mexican public health in the post-revolutionary era as well as an investigation into one of the Rockefeller Foundation's most significant ventures. Neither of these issues, however, is central for Birn. Rather, it is the long-lasting, fruitful and conflictual encounter between Mexico and the Rockefeller Foundation which is crucial. From the 1920s to the 1940s, the Foundation conducted a high-budget yellow fever campaign along the Gulf of Mexico and a far-reaching (though much less expensive) hookworm disease eradication campaign in the centre and in the south of the country. It established local health units in three states, sent sixty-eight public health fellows to North American universities and trained about 600 health workers in two training stations founded in Mexico. The relationship proved to be an “elastic and mutually beneficial marriage”. Imperialism, charity (international assistance), catalysis (foreign intervention to boost development), coincidence (foreign aid as a concomitant factor in the process of endogenous modernization), these are all concepts that explain such a relationship only to a certain extent. Accordingly, the book offers a fresh interpretation, which highlights interaction and competition alike between both partners. Birn explores the inherently national and nationalistic nature of modernity. Just as the creation of the Rockefeller charities had aimed to placate populist critics of Standard Oil, the intervention in Mexico was motivated by the necessity to ease tensions aroused by US invasions in 1914 and 1916. Birn rightly describes Rockefeller intervention in Mexico as a sort of “ersatz diplomacy” aka “invisible diplomacy” elsewhere (France). Of course, public health campaigns were put on display in order to protect foreign assets. But the Foundation took the nationalization of oil in 1938 as an opportunity visibly to demonstrate that its activities and commitment to Mexico were by no means connected with business interests. In appearance, the “Good Neighbor” policy of the mid-1930s might be regarded as a logical outcome of the Rockefeller Foundation strategy towards Mexico. Unlike Porfirio Diaz's regime, the post-revolutionary republic blended a pre-existing sense of ethnic heritage with the revolutionary values of political participation and autonomy. A militant intelligentsia keen on social medicine favoured a “vernacular mobilization” of Indian culture, associated with the spread of medical services in agricultural cooperatives (ejidos). The Rockefeller Foundation officers never felt at ease with this bottom-up nationalism. Another nationalist vision, the top-down building of a nation-state, united the Mexican medical elite and the Rockefeller officers. Heirs of the Porfiriato cientificos, although with a profoundly new face, and forerunners of the tecnicos of the 1970s, though with a socialist-populist ideology, well-educated doctors (thanks to Rockefeller fellowships) peopled the higher ranks of central public health bureaucracy. This double-barrelled nationalism helped bring about a more moderate sense of national identity among doctors whose traditional anti-Americanism had been aroused by the demanding standards imposed by the Rockefeller officers in their newly established health units (training, full-time commitment). It also helped to defuse the resistance of the rural population. Although by no means hostile towards the health units, villagers sometimes reacted with violence at the implementation of sanitary measures (smallpox vaccination, quarantine, DDT spraying). Certainly, Mexican and American physicians clashed more than once: upon the interpretation of the determinants of hookworm disease, and about the operating principles of the sanitary campaigns and the rural health service. Nevertheless, bureaucratic interest and a thirst for international prestige tied the modern professionalized state to US philanthropy. A proper balance was successfully achieved between Rockefeller aid and the preservation of the country's sovereignty—what Birn aptly calls “Rockefeller with a Mexican face”. In the end, did “Mexico shape the Rockefeller Foundation”? The Foundation's original style of governance remained untouched in many ways. In its usual manner, it played an “influential role” in Mexico, though “not a dominant one”. New York chose to circumscribe its activities to a limited section of the country and to a limited range of health problems. This does not deviate in the least from the road taken by the Foundation in 1915: “to pick up small things and do small things”. Birn would have it that “in Mexico, health revolutionaries and the [Rockefeller Foundation] took public health to be a technical force residing at the intersection of state building, economic growth, and material betterment” (p. 237). The question is, how can we reconcile this functionalist description (from politics to expertise) with the elitist nationalism that transformed technical issues into contentious high politics? In Mexico by and large, the Rockefeller Foundation's methods were remarkably similar in their patterns to those set in motion in the New South, or even in France for that matter. As the book itself demonstrates, the Foundation would first display ambitious campaigns (yellow fever, hookworm, tuberculosis), only subsequently to establish modern health units with exclusive and full-time personnel. And the whole effort would be embedded in a grand strategy of rural betterment, which the Foundation wished to spread throughout the world. This book will set the pace on the subject for many years to come. It is arranged with extraordinary care (not a single error could be found in the French references) and written in an inviting style, making it a real pleasure to read. Last, but not least, are the richness and high quality of the illustrations (apart from the map on p. 35, difficult to interpret).

Although it was one of the most influential public health agencies of the twentieth century and the best-endowed branch of the Rockefeller Foundation, the history of the International Health Division (IHD) has never been told so far. From his forays into the records of the Division, John Farley gives a fairly detailed account of the transnational disease campaigns that it conceptualized for the first time under the rubric of eradication. A “tribute” to the malariologist Lewis Hackett (p. 300), To cast out disease is at its best in the central chapters on hookworm, yellow fever and malaria. Farley makes no mystery of it; he believed from the start that the IHD was “more or less the American equivalent of the British Colonial Medical Service” (p. vii). This is understandable, coming as it does from the author of Bilharzia: a history of imperial tropical medicine (1991), but this perspective is somewhat misleading.

Butler et al 1 report convincing results confirming that the availability of HIV prevention tools, such as condoms in prisons, does not increase sexual activity among inmates but rather increases safe sex. These results represent a major step towards negating the widespread belief that the general availability of prevention measures in prisons increases at-risk practices associated with HIV, hepatitis and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Indeed, similar ad hoc studies regarding the availability of needles and syringes …