With the recent global attention on the Zika virus (we won't say emergence, as Zika virus itself is not new), public health programs focused on controlling the mosquito vector enter a debate with its own long and storied past.
Pick up any early 20th century book on infectious disease management and you'll find confident statements assuring the victory of humans over illness and death. One text from 1909 called Mosquito or Man? speaks of this inevitable triumph over disease with an air of colonial domination, stating:
The tropical world is today being steadily and surely conquered...The campaigns show that the three great insect-carried scourges of...