Abstrack:
From 1949-1967, newly decolonised Indonesia under President Soekarno was in the process of defining its identity within the larger international community in the context of Cold War between the USSR and USA. The US, under President Eisenhower had launched the malaria eradication programme to aid newly decolonised countries of Africa and Asia, including Indonesia as a part of the ?Point Four Programme? to contain communism. While the US advocated support for the malaria eradication programme in newly decolonised nations of Africa and Asia as a valuable weapon in the fight against communism, President Soekarno perceived malaria eradication as a means to reconstruct Manusia Indonesia Baru ( The New Indonesian) in the light of the pembangunan( developmentalism) ideology. While the US supplied Indonesia?s initial DDT requirements in its malaria eradication campaign, the Minister of Health, Johannes Leimena perceived manufacture of DDT within Indonesia as a synecdoche to self sufficiency in economic matters(berdiri kaki sendiri). While there is a rich historiography documenting post World War II disease eradication programmes in India, Latin America, and Africa, the Indonesian post World War II disease eradication campaigns seem to have escaped the attention of historians of medicine. Situating the history of disease eradication campaigns in Indonesia within the context of the Soekarno era would illustrate the impact of pembangunan ideology on health and the way disease eradication was seen as a component of nation building. This paper argues that it would be over simplistic to assume that disease eradication as a prescription for social and economic change merely reflected the ability of Western science to transform underdeveloped countries. Nor were technological interventions alone such as BCG vaccination against tuberculosis or arsenical shots against yaws magic bullets against disease. Rather, disease eradication in post World War II Indonesia depended on the charisma of the public health personnel such as the Djuru Patek (involved in eradication of yaws) to affect behavioural change of the population to accept new technologies of the twentieth century such as the introduction of the arsenical shots. The Indonesian disease eradication campaigns of the 1950s in many ways reflect the interplay between the two approaches to public health: the social medicine approach to public health, which emphasises development of basic health services; the magic bullet approach, typified by the use of DDT in malaria control in 1959. Examining the history of disease eradication in Indonesia through an interplay of these two approaches to public health would help gauge the average Indonesian?s perceptions to technological interventions in disease control.
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