Did malaria elimination begin to lose its way in 1925? “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”

This paper begins with a brief examination of the first start made anywhere of a successful national malaria-elimination campaign. This start was made in 1922 in Palestine. The paper examines the essential education that was required to make the campaign so successful, thereby ensuring all inhabitants treated all aspects of the malaria-elimination as an absolute priority. Such priority led to the vital cooperation required for the necessary steps in the malaria-elimination method. But the paper also highlights a criticism of the campaign by the League of Nations in 1925 when the League sent its Malaria Commission to Palestine to investigate the campaign which it had heard about. The author tends to conclude that the education of all the inhabitants, of both Arabs and Jews, and which resulted in the inhabitants’ very strong cooperation, was actually contrary to, or in conflict with, the natural inclination of the members of the Malaria Commission whose governments were mainly still, in 1925, colonial powers. The paper then moves on to present times and concludes the lack of success in malaria-elimination in many areas throughout the world is greatly due to the failure to provide that same personal education to the inhabitants that was provided in Palestine 100 years ago, principally because the governments in many malarious countries have not moved on from colonial times. The author’s personal conclusion, impression and opinion is that there appears to be hardly any sense of priority for the various malaria-elimination campaigns being presently conducted around the world, and where involved governments are probably still retaining old colonial attitudes when dealing with their respective populations.