Malaria Eradication and Population Growth

Abstract
According to the author, many have uncritically blamed malaria eradication as a major culprit in the population explosion. His present purpose is to make estimates of what the population growth would have been in the absence of malaria eradication and so derive the total contribution to population growth made by the postwar anti-malaria campaigns in British Guiana and Ceylon. Newman concludes that malaria eradication contributed to the postwar acceleration of population growth about 60 percent in Ceylon, and about 40 percent in British Guiana. Despite the wealth of data on births, deaths, population, and the prevalence of malaria in British Guiana and Ceylon, the author fails to quantify the extension of insecticides in time and place. In British Guiana, large scale spraying of insecticides first began in 1947. By that time, infant mortality as well as the crude death rates had already declined from wartime peaks to the long-term downtrends, neither of which were obviously accelerated upon the large scale application of insecticides.

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