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To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2006.06.002 Byline: Eric D. Carter Abstract: This study traces the evolution of social-environmental models of malaria control in Northwest Argentina. Beginning in the 1890s, the rationale for malaria control hinged on a narrative that placed malaria as the root cause of the Northwest's chronic backwardness. Insalubrious rural and urban landscapes, underutilized agricultural potential, unproductive labor, and even racial decay were all bound together as a public health problem. The framework for understanding malaria in the environment was derived from miasmatic theory and medical geography, anchoring the disease firmly in particular landscapes. Wetlands, representing both economic waste and a public health hazard, were singled out as targets for reclamation. Thus 'environmental sanitation' techniques, especially wetland drainage, became the preferred strategy for the federal government's malaria campaign, initiated in 1907. The 'socio-ecological' orientation of the Italian malaria campaign under Fascism, in which large-scale wetland reclamation for malaria control seemed to produce a comprehensive transformation of rural land and life, had a strong influence in Argentina, further entrenching environmental sanitation methods. By the 1930s, however, it became apparent that Italy's wetlands served poorly as landscape analogues for Argentina's Northwest. In particular, the main mosquito vector in the region turned out not to be a stereotypical 'swamp breeder,' rendering pointless most wetland drainage efforts. A counter-model, which adopted the framework of ecological science, proved to be more sensitive to the behaviors and microenvironments of different mosquito species, while disentangling malaria control from the broader and mostly unrealistic social development goals of the older model. Author Affiliation: Geography Department, Millersville University of Pennsylvania, PO Box 1002, Millersville, PA 17551-0302, USA

Abstract Despite the influence of neo-Malthusian thinking in international development and environmental policy during the mid twentieth century, this story is often told from a US-centered perspective, with population control policies seen to roll out from the world geopolitical centers to the 'Global South' via the influence of large development institutions. Latin American perspectives on the population control question are seldom considered, except to suggest that the Catholic Church provided consistent, organized opposition to the expansion of family planning services. In this paper, using an political-intellectual history approach, I explore how the population question intersected with interrelated development issues in Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century: health and nutrition, food and agriculture, rural livelihoods, economic dependency, and women's rights. I focus on the relationship between public health crises and pro-natalist policies; the influences of the eugenics movement in supporting national population growth as a biopolitical strategy; anarcho-feminist thought that stressed the emancipatory potential of fertility control and new social roles for women; the Brazilian Josué de Castro's research on the causes of famine and malnutrition, which took a structuralist approach and explicitly rejected neo-Malthusian and other environmentally determinist approaches to understand the causes of poverty and hunger; and Latin American engagements with the international family planning and population control agenda in the 1960s. With this history in mind, we can trace alternative intellectual roots of political ecology's critique of neo-Malthusianism and other deterministic environment-development theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting in the 1930s, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) created a globally influential model of regional development through centralized planning of massive public works to re-engineer social and natural systems in impoverished areas. TVA invested heavily in malaria control, since its own reservoirs created perfect breeding grounds for malaria-carrying anopheles mosquitoes. Eventually, both the TVA and malaria control would become key elements in an influential metanarrative in which an American ideology of 'technological modernism' dominated international development in the post-World War II era, until modern environmentalism and other social movements undermined the assumptions and goals of this ideology. This paper argues that a more subtle understanding of the history of ecological thought in regional development and malaria control challenges the dominant metanarrative. TVA malaria control actually reflected a tension between two important and competing ideological threads of TVA's master ethos of integrated regional development: socio-ecological holism and techno-scientific reductionism. Socio-ecological holism provided the grand vision for a transformation of nature and society, conceived as a unitary whole. But it was techno-scientific reductionism, which accommodated intimate, ecologically grounded knowledge of the habitats and behaviors of anopheles mosquitoes, that made malaria control possible. In this way, the TVA experience reflected theory and practice in malaria control internationally, before the advent of DDT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although mostly forgotten, malaria was once widespread in Argentina's Northwest region and had a dramatic impact on public health and social development. This paper explores the malaria problem in the social, demographic, and environmental context of Argentina in the early 1900s, when prevalence of the disease was at its height. Using a diverse range of sources and a mixture of historical demographic, spatial analytical, and qualitative methods, the geographical distribution of malaria and its association with social and environmental factors is analyzed. Examination of the general epidemiology of malaria in the Northwest is complemented by case studies that demonstrate the complex dynamics of malaria in the city of Salta and the agricultural hinterland of Tucumán province. Although malaria was a widespread and commonplace illness in the region, and garnered much political attention, it was neither a leading cause of mortality not a cause of demographic stagnation. Improvements in sanitary infrastructure and drainage helped facilitate the decline of malaria in urban centers, although the relationship of the disease with wetland hazards remains unclear. In rural areas, the tenuous and impoverished conditions of agricultural laborers helped to sustain malaria transmission, bur permanent workers in sugar mills enjoyed better health conditions, generally. Overall, this paper demonstrates the utility, of historical statistical and spatial analysis, complemented by more fine-grained qualitative research, in drawing out the social and environmental dimensions of past disease complexes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]