Malaria Eradication and the Selective Approach to Health Care: Some Lessons from Ethiopia

Analysis of the failure of the World Health Organization's global malaria campaign has contributed to the formulation of the primary health care concept as the basic international strategy for health improvement. The Primary Health Care Conference held in Alma-Ata in 1978 was to have ended the period of vertical disease control programs, such as the one against malaria, stressing instead the integration of these programs into horizontal community-based health systems. Malaria control programs, however, have not been integrated well--or in some cases at all--into primary health care networks. An analysis of the Ethiopian experience, as part of the worldwide malaria eradication program, illustrates the political and economic forces that have worked against the move from vertical to integrated malaria control activities, and from vertical to integrated health programs more generally.