Mosquitoes or malaria? Rockefeller campaigns in the American South and Sardinia.

Most members of the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation remained convinced that diseases were the fundamental cause of human poverty and underdevelopment and that destruction of the larval stages of vector mosquitoes was the cheapest and most effective way to eliminate one of the most important of such diseases, malaria. But the validity of both their assumptions remains in question despite campaigns in the American South and elsewhere during the 1920s and 1930s and an unsuccessful attempt at "species eradication" in Sardinia immediately after World War II.