The antimalaria campaign in Italy between control and eradication: the Sardinian experiment]

The aim of this paper is to examine historically the alternative between control and eradication of the infectious diseases, starting with the idea of eradication itself, a result of the Pasteurian revolution. The eradication of malaria in Italy is taken as a case study. Through an extensive use of the archival sources, the alternative between control and eradication is analysed for the first years of the Sardinian Project, directed by the Rockefeller Foundation, that resulted in the eradication of malaria in Sardinia. This program is compared with the different program, grounded in the Italian malariological tradition, that in the same years carried out the eradication of malaria in the rest of Italy.