Talk:Malaria in Mandatory Palestine

Much more work needed
This article is mostly a biography of one person whose article contains more than is here anyway. The main problem is that the article adopts the common pretence that malarial control was a purely Zionist endeavour, ignoring the vital role of the British administration. Zerotalk 03:28, 5 February 2024 (UTC)


 * Was this during Mandatory Palestine? I think there were some attempts to control malaria during the Ottoman period by Sir Philip Manson-Bahr and other scientists, but they were not successful. Kliger does seem to be the scientist who was the largest contributor in reducing malaria in Palestine based on the decrease in incidence rates during the time period.
 * Are you sure about the British administration? According to Malaria Journal, "Importantly, the anti-malarial campaign in Palestine had been incorporated within the overall Zionist strategy for colonizing Palestine, which meant that it was well funded and organized efficiently by the Jewish National Fund. British mandate authorities approved the project but did not significantly contribute to its realization." Wafflefrites (talk) 05:37, 5 February 2024 (UTC)
 * But I agree, a lot of this article seems to have been copy and pasted from Israel Jacob Kliger. Wafflefrites (talk) 05:45, 5 February 2024 (UTC)
 * This is "Zionists made the desert bloom" stuff, though as always there is some truth to it. The Zionist program was primary aimed at the regions of Jewish settlement, and sometimes adjacent Arab settlements. In some cases the government supported the work with expertise and money. The responsibility for the larger Arab areas, and also for urban areas, was taken by the government, who did a lot of work on it starting even before 1920. For example, a drainage project at Birket Ramadan cost 22,500 pounds. The government also passed multiple regulations concerning mosquito control. However, it isn't correct to infer that there were two separate projects. People like Kligler were in constant contact with the government and all major works needed government involvement. For example in the 1924 report to the League of Nations we read "Considerable works of swamp reclamation have been or are being carried out under the supervision of the Department of Health, the Malaria Survey Section and the Research Unit; as a result, the malarial marshes of the coastal plain of Esdraelon, the Jezreel Valley and Galilee are gradually disappearing and the soil is returning to cultivation and settlement." Calling it a purely Zionist project is simply wrong. I don't have time to work on this article in the near future but I'll try to get back to it. Zerotalk 06:09, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

I found a 1932 article of Kligler (https://www.jstor.org/stable/1018968) that has this summary:
 * "Malaria is one of the most important endemic and epidemic diseases in the country. In most of the cities malaria has been brought under control by the efforts of the Department of Health. In the urban communities, where malaria is transmitted by an Anopheles breeding in cisterns, the effective control of these cisterns by the Health Department has practically eliminated the disease. In the rural and those urban communities where streams, bogs, and marshes are responsible for the transmission of the disease, much remains to be done. In these regions, Jewish effort in control, drainage, and so forth, has largely brought the disease under control in Jewish and neighboring Arab villages. In non-Jewish areas, such as Acre, the Huleh plain, the region east of Beisan, and other sections, malaria is still highly prevalent. But, by and large, tremendous progress has been made in the last ten years toward the control and, in many places, the elimination of this scourge." Zerotalk 06:39, 5 February 2024 (UTC)