WHO launches the world’s first global malaria eradication programme

Story: 1955 C.E.  |  Last updated: May 1, 1955

In the spring of 1955 C.E., delegates at the Eighth World Health Assembly voted to do something no international body had ever attempted: coordinate a planet-wide campaign to wipe out a disease that had been killing human beings for tens of thousands of years. The Global Malaria Eradication Programme was born — and with it, a new idea about what collective human action could actually accomplish.

What the evidence shows

• Global malaria eradication: The WHO’s programme, launched in 1955 C.E., was the first coordinated international effort to eliminate malaria across multiple continents simultaneously, using DDT-based indoor spraying and drug therapy as its primary tools.
• Malaria transmission: The disease is spread by infected female Anopheles mosquitoes, whose bites introduce Plasmodium parasites into human blood — parasites that destroy red blood cells and, in severe cases, cause coma, organ failure, and death.
• WHO disease campaign: By the time the programme was suspended in 1969 C.E., it had eliminated malaria from 37 countries and territories, including the United States, most of Europe, and parts of Asia — one of the largest public health achievements of the 20th century.

A disease as old as civilization

Malaria is ancient. Plasmodium parasites have been found preserved in amber-trapped mosquitoes dating back 30 million years, and genetic evidence suggests the parasite has been infecting humans since long before recorded history. By the early 20th century C.E., it was endemic across much of Africa, Asia, Latin America, Southern Europe, and the American South.

The disease operates with quiet, terrible efficiency. A mosquito feeds at dusk or overnight. The parasites it deposits travel to the liver, multiply unseen, then flood the bloodstream — destroying red blood cells, triggering fevers, and in severe cases starving the brain and vital organs of oxygen. Children under five are especially vulnerable. Pregnant women face heightened risks of miscarriage, stillbirth, and dangerously low birth weight in their newborns.

For most of human history, malaria shaped where people could live, which agricultural lands could be farmed, and which trade routes were viable. Its influence on human settlement patterns, military history, and economic development is almost impossible to overstate.

Why 1955 C.E. was a turning point

Two tools made the 1955 C.E. campaign feel newly possible. The first was DDT — a synthetic insecticide that, sprayed on interior walls, could kill mosquitoes resting after a blood meal. The second was chloroquine, a drug that could both prevent and treat malaria infection at low cost. Together, they seemed to offer a narrow but real window to break transmission chains before resistance could develop.

The WHO moved decisively. Member states committed funding and personnel. National programs were stood up across dozens of countries. Spray teams moved village to village. In regions where the programme was fully implemented, results were dramatic. Sri Lanka, for example, saw cases fall from around 2.8 million per year in the late 1940s C.E. to just 17 recorded cases by 1963 C.E. Greece, Italy, and much of the Caribbean were declared malaria-free. The United States, which had already been running its own eradication program, confirmed elimination in 1951 C.E. — and the WHO campaign consolidated those gains globally.

The ambition of the effort was itself historic. It represented a new model of global health governance: sovereign nations pooling resources and sharing technical expertise under international coordination to tackle a threat none could solve alone.

Lasting impact

Even where the programme fell short of total eradication, its effects saved millions of lives. Researchers estimate that the campaign prevented hundreds of millions of malaria infections and dramatically reduced child mortality in affected regions during the late 1950s C.E. and 1960s C.E.

The institutional knowledge built during the campaign — in surveillance systems, spray logistics, drug distribution, and community health outreach — became the backbone of later global health initiatives. The programme also demonstrated that international cooperation on health was operationally feasible, not merely aspirational. That lesson directly shaped the frameworks that later addressed smallpox, polio, and HIV.

Sub-Saharan African nations, where malaria transmission was heaviest and the ecological conditions made eradication far harder, were largely excluded from the eradication target of the 1955 C.E. campaign — classified instead as regions for “control” rather than elimination. Researchers and public health historians have since noted that this decision reflected both the technical limits of the tools available and the political and resource inequities of the era. The regions left out of the eradication goal are still where the disease hits hardest today: in 2023 C.E., around 95% of malaria’s estimated 597,000 deaths occurred in sub-Saharan Africa.

Community health workers, many of them women working in rural and remote areas across Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific, were essential to the spray and treatment campaigns. Their labor rarely appeared in the institutional histories that credited the programme’s successes.

Blindspots and limits

The programme was suspended in 1969 C.E. after it became clear that global eradication was not achievable with the tools and funding available. DDT resistance emerged in mosquito populations. Chloroquine resistance followed in P. falciparum. Political instability, inadequate infrastructure, and funding shortfalls derailed national programs in multiple countries — including Sri Lanka, where cases rebounded sharply after spraying was reduced.

The failure in sub-Saharan Africa was not incidental. The decision to pursue control rather than eradication there reflected resource allocation choices shaped by colonial-era assumptions about what was achievable in those regions — and the consequences of that choice have compounded across decades. Today, drug resistance to artemisinin-based therapies is an emerging concern in parts of Southeast Asia, and the scientific community continues to debate what a genuine global eradication effort would require. As of 2023 C.E., the WHO estimates 263 million malaria cases worldwide, down significantly from historical peaks but still a staggering human toll.

What came next

The 1955 C.E. campaign seeded later efforts. The Roll Back Malaria Partnership, founded in 1998 C.E., brought renewed global coordination. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, established in 2002 C.E., channeled billions into prevention and treatment. Insecticide-treated bed nets became a major intervention — reaching hundreds of millions of households across Africa and Asia.

Two malaria vaccines have now been endorsed by the WHO. RTS,S/AS01 (Mosquirix), approved in 2021 C.E., was the first vaccine against a parasitic disease ever cleared for broad use. A second vaccine, R21/Matrix-M, followed in 2023 C.E. Neither offers complete protection, but both represent a qualitative shift in what the global response to malaria can look like.

The 1955 C.E. programme did not end malaria. But it proved that organized human effort could drive the disease out of entire regions — and that the goal of a malaria-free world was not purely utopian. Researchers at institutions like the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine continue to work toward that goal, building on seventy years of hard-won knowledge that began with a vote in Geneva in the spring of 1955 C.E.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Wikipedia — Malaria: Eradication efforts

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