Cookies on this website

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you click 'Accept all cookies' we'll assume that you are happy to receive all cookies and you won't see this message again. If you click 'Reject all non-essential cookies' only necessary cookies providing core functionality such as security, network management, and accessibility will be enabled. Click 'Find out more' for information on how to change your cookie settings.

In the early 1960s, Tatjana Sergeevna Detinova, a preeminent Soviet entomologist, attempted to assist the WHO’s Global Malaria Eradication Programme (GMEP) by offering training in the Polovodova method—an infamously exacting dissection method used to determine the physiological age of a female mosquito by examining structural changes in its ovary, and by extension, their disease carrying capacity. The efforts to deploy this technique to evaluate pilot DDT-spraying schemes in Africa provides a compelling case of the trade-offs between what is knowable and what is doable in large-scale disease control. We suggest that the staggered circulation of the Polovodova technique, and the models that were built up after it, provides a lens onto the shifting epidemiological conjugations of entomological knowledge across the long durée of malaria control programmes and, more broadly, the ways in which logics of contagion come to demarcate the field of scientific vision.

Type

Journal article

Journal

History of the Human Sciences

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Publication Date

30/06/2025

Keywords

malaria eradication, entomology, WHO, USSR