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In 1906, Emílio Ribas reorganized the Sanitation Service and centralized São Paulo state public health services in the state capital. A campaign to combat trachoma, an ophthalmic disease, was implemented as part of this project. This article analyzes this campaign, which provided care for the sick living on rural properties in a process that predated the 1917 Rural Sanitary Code. The empirical data was obtained from government reports, decrees, medical journals and newspapers. We conclude that Ribas, by creating an organization that integrated the efforts of the sanitary districts and the Trachoma Commission medical teams, sought to form a complex apparatus to combat the diseases present in both urban areas and the countryside.

From its inception, in 1948, the World Health Organization made control of malaria a high priority. Early successes led many to believe that eradication was possible, although there were serious doubts concerning the continent of Africa. As evidence mounted that eradicating malaria was not a simple matter, the malaria eradication programme was downgraded to a unit in 1980. Revived interest in malaria followed the Roll Back Malaria Initiative adopted in 1998. This article presents an historical account of the globally changing ideas on control and elimination of the disease and argues that insufficient attention was paid to strengthening health services and specialized human resources.

The subdiscipline of historical epidemiology holds the promise of creating a more robust and more nuanced foundation for global public health decision-making by deepening the empirical record from which we draw lessons about past interventions. This essay draws upon historical epidemiological research on three global public health campaigns to illustrate this promise: the Rockefeller Foundation's efforts to control hookworm disease (1909-c.1930), the World Health Organization's pilot projects for malaria eradication in tropical Africa (1950s-1960s), and the international efforts to shut down the transmission of Ebola virus disease during outbreaks in tropical Africa (1974-2019).

According to David Fidler, the governance of infectious diseases evolved from the mid-nineteenth to the twenty-first century as a series of institutional arrangements: the International Sanitary Regulations (non-interference and disease control at borders), the World Health Organization vertical programs (malaria and smallpox eradication campaigns), and a post-Westphalian regime standing beyond state-centrism and national interest. But can international public health be reduced to such a Westphalian image? We scrutinize three strategies that brought health borders into prominence: pre-empting weak states (eastern Mediterranean in the nineteenth century); preventing the spread of disease through nation-building (Macedonian public health system in the 1920s); and debordering the fight against epidemics (1920-1921 Russian-Polish war and the Warsaw 1922 Sanitary Conference).

After the Spanish Civil War, poor hygiene and nutritional deficiencies among a large part of Spain's population contributed to the rise of epidemic diseases. Exanthematic typhus posed a challenge to the health authorities, especially during the spring of 1941, when the epidemiological cycle of the disease and the lack of infrastructures combined to create a serious health crisis. The Franco regime, aware that this situation posed a threat to its legitimacy, promptly used social exclusion as part of its health policy against the epidemic. This article provides an in-depth analysis of the case of Valencia, a city that was behind Republican lines during the war, and therefore received successive waves of refugees as Franco's troops advanced.

This article discusses the various proposals and strategies to prevent the transmission of pulmonary tuberculosis in the City of Mexico from the 1920s decade onwards, when it was launched the first long-term campaign against the disease, and analyses the limitations and challenges faced until 1940. It looks upon the motives that led the need to contain the transmission of the disease to occupy a dominant role after ten years of civil war; it focuses on the models and strategies implemented, and examines the challenges faced by the construction and operation of the Huipulco Tuberculosis Sanatorium, a key component of the fight against tuberculosis at the international level since long ago.

This article examines anti-treponematoses work as part of US occupation public health policy in Haiti, a unique event in the history of international health. Yaws was highly prevalent in Haiti, but occupation doctors initially ignored it because of its close association with syphilis and stigmas attached to sexually transmitted disease. This changed when C.S. Butler asserted that yaws was "innocent" and that the two diseases should therefore be considered as one. Treatment increased as an anti-treponematoses campaign was now believed to hold great benefits for the occupation's paternalist and strategic aims, even though it ultimately failed. This work reflected Haiti's status as a public health "laboratory" which affected Haitian medicine for years to come and significantly influenced future campaigns aimed at disease eradication.

This article resurrects the puppet show Las calenturas de Don Ferruco (Don Ferruco's Fevers), which was televised in the late 1950s in order to help eradicate malaria in Mexico, as a useful instrument for health education. It analyzes how the spread of educational puppet shows on Mexican television showed the need to keep updating preventive healthcare pedagogy and it underlines the importance of television as an educational health-promotion production in the mid-twentieth century. The article discusses the early use of puppet shows as an especially important tool for what would later become mass-media transmission of discourses from the Secretaría de Salubridad y Asistencia (Department of Health and Healthcare).

During his years of study in Switzerland and Germany, Adolpho Lutz published his first articles on zoology, clinical practice, and therapeutics. In Limeira, São Paulo, he began studies on animal and human diseases caused by germs and parasites. In 1885-86, Lutz traveled to Hamburg to study the morphology of germs related to skin diseases, in conjunction with Paul Gerson Unna, one of Germany's foremost dermatologists. He proposed the inclusion of Hansen's and Koch's bacilli in a new genus. In 1889, Unna nominated his student as physician-in-chief of the Leper Settlement on Molokai Island, Hawaii. From then on, Lutz sustained the theory that the disease was transmitted by mosquitos. He conducted research to prove this theory when he was head of the Instituto Bacteriológico de São Paulo (1893-1908) and, later, after he moved to the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz (1908-1940). Although this research was not successful, on commissions and at congresses in which he participated until his death in October 1940, he still held to his conviction that leprosy was transmitted by mosquitoes.

This article aims to retrieve the history of Hansen's disease in Brazil, analyzing the medical thinking of the time and the shaping of health policies that permitted the implementation, in São Paulo, of a prophylactic policy of compulsory exclusion for all Hansen's disease patients. It also analyzes how the structuring and implementation of this policy led to a "São paulo model" that strongly influenced the rest of the country. It addresses the creation of the state's network of leper colonies, their characteristics and the emergence of a veritable "parallel state" that endured until 1967, with complete disregard of all the changes taking place in both national and international prophylactic policymaking.

The interviewee speaks about the endemic disease, which at present contaminates 4.4 out of ten thousand inhabitants in Brazil, the country with the second highest number of patients. When Tadiana speaks about the Brazilian participation in the program launched by the World Health Organization, she explains that WHO's objective is to extinguish Hansen's disease on the planet until 2005. However, she says that Brazilian main goal is to reduce the occurrence of the disease to less than one case per ten thousand people. In our country, the structure and the organization of this program, which comprehends the education and specialization of professionals in order to guarantee early diagnoses, as well as patients' follow-up during treatment, is developed by Sistema Unico de Saúde (SUS) and has been implemented in all the states of the federation. The chemotherapy treatment lasts about a year, when taken seriously. In many cases, the disease comes back a while later. Tadiana comments on the differences of the disease according to the different regions of the country. It has been extinguished in the South,whereas the rates in the North and Central East regions almost reach endemic peaks. Working close to patients and ex-patients associations, first as a nurse and later in the implementation of policies for Hansen's disease issues, Tadiana Alves Moreira stresses the importance of early diagnoses, which avoid the physical damages and deformities that take place in the advanced stages of the disease, so reducing the stigma over the diseased.

Since the 1920s, the medical community realized that the strategy of leprosy control based on segregation and persecution of patients was inefficient and expensive. In the 1930s the new liberal government incorporated leprosy within the general sanitary institutions, by merging the Bureau of Lazarettos and the National Department of Hygiene. The disease-apart approach started to be replaced by a more general public health strategy, which involved controlling other illnesses. Prevention and research played a more influential role, and the new sanitary officials saw leprosy in the light of the economic rationality of expenditures, placing more emphasis on therapies and making them mandatory for all patients. Improvements in leprosy treatment became widely known and available. However, the image of leprosy as a special condition and the practice of segregation were deeply entrenched within the Colombian culture and institutions. The rhetoric changed, but to break with several decades of persecution was a difficult task.

The article examines the Colombian medical field's fight against so-called venereal diseases between 1886 and 1951, a period when the country was undergoing processes of urbanization, population growth, and the emergence both of industry as well as of a middle class and an urban proletariat. Physicians found a close connection between the spread of syphilis and gonorrhea and the rise of prostitution in cities. At the close of the 19th century, doctors and public health bodies assumed prostitution was inevitable. In 1907 they managed to have it legalized and they opened clinics to dispense mercury therapy and treatment with arsenic compounds. Starting in the 1930s amd 1940s, treatment of venereal diseases was viewed as the State's duty, necessary to protect "la raza" and safeguard progress and civilization. As of 1950, the efficient use of penicillin once again caused the question of prostitution to be posed in more moral and aesthetic terms and brought an end to the regulations groverning its practice, at least in Bogota.

The article discusses a set of pictures that illustrate public health activities, practices, and campaigns against malaria in Brazil from 1918 through 1956. Exemplary of certain key moments in this history, the illustrations belong to three archives from the Casa de Oswaldo Cruz/Fundação Oswaldo Cruz collection: Arquivo Belisário Penna, Arquivto Fundação Rockefeller ("Serviço de Malária do Nordeste" series), and Arquivo Rostan Soares. The article links these photographic records to their specific historical-public health contexts and to the campaign models and strategies represented by each archive. It also draws relations with the 20th -century history of the photographic medium itself. It is argued that these images of malaria constitute prime sources in constructing a visual history of the disease in 20th -century Brazil and of the country's public health history.

Emilio Ribas, an administrative physician and sanitarian from Sao Paulo, was an advocate of the microbiological conception during the long period when he directed the Servico Sanitario de Sao Paulo (1898-1917). This article offers a brief analysis of his stance in the flight against yellow fever during the early 20th century, considered a highlight of his career. The scientists and professionals linked to this sanitary agency in Sao Paulo found themselves in a tense, unstable work environment, where experimental proof played an important role in corroborating new medical-sanitary conceptions and practices. The article takes a close look at the medical experiments on yellow fever directed by Emilio Ribas and conducted at Sao Paulo's Hospital de Isolamento in 1902-03. It examines these same studies in an effort to better understand how the significance of yellow fever was transformed and to explore its implications regarding the history of public health in Sao Paulo.