The means and models of malaria eradication: untangling the mosquito ovary across the Iron Curtain

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.