Criticism of WHO's revised malaria eradication strategy

Fred L. Soper played a key role in promoting the idea that malaria could be eradicated world-wide. He believed eradication to be feasible based on the ability of household insecticide spraying to interrupt malaria transmission. He opposed WHO's strategy to reduce the number of years devoted to spraying and to rely instead on chemotherapy to wipe out remaining foci of malaria. While his criticism was intense, it neither featured in the discussions of the World Health Assembly nor the WHO malaria Expert Committee. The author concludes that had his criticism been heard the global campaign could have been stopped far earlier than in fact it was. Furthermore, failure to openly address Soper's criticism represented a major failure on the part of the WHO Secretariat to ensure that policy decisions reflected a full consideration of all underlying issues, technical or otherwise.