Malaria is believed to have been introduced to Sardinia with the arrival of infected workers after the Carthaginian conquest of Sardinia in the 5th century BC.
The Sardinian Project & DDT
Sardinia was held hostage by Malaria until 1949 when it was eradicated by the Rockefeller Foundation. From 1946-1950 the island was sprayed with DDT, an insecticide that is now banned by most nations around the world.
The Rockefeller Foundation wanted to use Sardinia as a test site to see if it would be possible to eradicate malaria from the rest of the Mediterranean using the same techniques. The campaign had the slogan ‘Today Sardinia, tomorrow the world’.
The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration also funded the large scale operation. It todays terms this campaign would have cost over two billion euros, so you can imagine how ambitious this was.
Spraying Sardinia
The chemical was sprayed everywhere in Sardinia, including inside every home, every historic site, the countryside was sprayed from above. They used 267 metric tones of DDT on Sardinia and the project involved 32,000 workers.
Even today in Sardinia, you can find the stencil markings outside houses (that haven’t been repainted since the 50s), to indicate which homes had already been sprayed.
Did it work?
The project was considered a failure by the groups involved, they had stopped the transmission of malaria, but were unable to completely eradicate the species of mosquito Anopheles.
The species survived, but now local authorities in Sardinia would be able to control the malaria situation. The breeding areas of the Anopheles were reduced to 0.07% of what they were before the spraying.
This meant that Sardinian’s could return to areas of the countryside that were since abandoned due to a large number of mosquitos and set the path to a brighter future. Later in 1970, the WHO declared that Sardinia was free from Malaria.
Cases of malaria, by year, Sardinia, 1946–1952
| Year | Number of cases (replapses) |
| 1946 | 74, 641 |
| 1947 | 39, 303 |
| 1948 | 15, 121 |
| 1949 | 1, 314 |
| 1950 | 0 (44) |
| 1951 | 9 (8) |
| 1952 | 0 |
The Eradication Of Malaria
The eradication of malaria helped Sardinia improve its public health programs and also paved the way for socio-economic development. But at a huge environmental cost that is incalculable. Some farmers accused the DTT of killing their livestock, bees and also fish.
DDT is known to be harmful to humans, a study I read conducted 45 years after the project, found that there were no adverse health effects in the population of Sardinia. There are lots of controversy around this, as there was at the time of the spraying. Spraying on this scale will have consequences.
Forests and Malaria
Malaria cast a large shadow over Sardinia, D.H Lawrence travelled through Sardinia in 1921, at the time nets were placed on all the trains to stop the malaria-mosquitoes. He writes ‘August and September are the danger months’ as they would breed inevitably. He was happy to enter into the woods and forests of Gennargentu where there was no malaria.
Sardinia used to be filled with forests but many were cleared by different occupying powers. Forests were clear to produce grains to feed the empires and later for the production of Europe’s railways. When trees are taken from a landscape, it means the water will run down increasing flooding and free-standing pools of water, which is the habitat in which mosquitos breed rapidly.
I watched a very interesting documentary which documents the campaign to eradicate malaria from Sardinia. Here it is below. It gives you a sense of the scale and the difficulties they faced to spray the whole of Sardinia