Nancy Leys Stepan

On the continued appeal of disease eradication

Cover Interview of January 01, 2012

One of the strange things about eradication is how it repeatedly arises, phoenix-like, from its setbacks.

Fred Lowe Soper paradoxically embraced the cause of disease eradication in the 1930s, just as the Rockefeller Foundation abandoned the project. Smallpox eradication was re-born in 1967, just before malaria eradication was given up by WHO. Polio eradication was launched in 1988, just when many public health experts rejected eradication altogether, in favor of concentrating on primary health care.

What explains the continued appeal of eradication, despite the rarity of success?

polemics / public policy / health / disease / public health / malaria / polio / smallpox / soper fred lowe / henderson donald /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009