Paper short abstract:

This paper examines why a global health intervention in Tanzania to teat neglected tropical diseases was so vehemently rejected. While officials blamed locals for spreading ‘rumours’, ethnographic research reveals how global inequalities shaped local fears of covert eugenic plots.

Paper long abstract:

In 2008, a biomedical intervention providing free drugs to school aged children to treat two endemic diseases - schistosomiasis haematobium and soil-transmitted helminths - in Morogoro region, Tanzania, was suspended after violent riots erupted. Parents rushed to schools to prevent their children taking the drugs when they heard reports of children dying after receiving treatment, and fighting ensued. News of these apparent fatalities spread throughout the region, including to the village where I was conducting my doctoral fieldwork.

This paper discusses why this biomedical intervention was so vehemently rejected. By examining local understandings of this public health intervention in relation to the specific historical, social, political, and economic context in which it occurred, it shows that there was considerable disjuncture between biomedical understandings of these diseases, including the epidemiological rationale for the provision of preventive chemotherapy, and local perspectives. Such a disjuncture brought about considerable conjecture both locally and nationally, that the drugs had been faulty, counterfeit, or hitherto untested on humans. Among many of the poorer inhabitants of Morogoro there was widespread suspicion that this had been a covert sterilization campaign. From an official perspective, such conjecture was dismissed as mere rumour, proliferated by "ignorant" people. However, from an anthropological perspective, these 'rumours' reveal profound local anxieties including a pervasive fear that poor Africans are being targeted for covert eugenics projects by governments in the industrialized world under the guise of global health.