Homing in on helminths.

I am honored to give this lecture dedicated to the memory of Dr. Fred Soper, whose pioneering efforts against the insect vectors of malaria and yellow fever are legendary. Soper and his col leagues also played key roles in restoring the con cept of eradication to respectability after the col lapse of earlier campaigns to eradicate hookworm and yellow fever. When Soper was himself in vited to give the first of five Fred Soper Lectures to mark his retirement as regional director of the Pan American Health Organization in 1959, he entitled his lecture Rehabilitation of the Eradi cation Concept in Prevention of Communicable Diseases.' Ten years later, The World Health Or ganization (WHO)'s abandonment of the de clared goal of malaria eradication marked an other nadir in the acceptability of the concept of eradication, from which we are only now re emerging. One measure of the change is that the Director General of WHO in 1980 wrote that “Important lessons can be learned from smallpox eradica tion, but the idea that we should single out other diseases for worldwide eradication is not among them.―2By 1988, the same Director-General had endorsed the goal of polio eradication.3 Under sponsorship of a grant from the Charles A. Dana Foundation, there is now an International Task Force for Disease Eradication, the Secretariat of which is located at the Carter Center. That Task Force has developed criteria for systematically assessing the eradicability of candidate diseases, and has used those criteria to evaluate 15 dis eases so far.4'5 The Task Force plans to review 14 other diseases in 1992. Of the diseases re viewed to date, two—dracunculiasis and polio myelitis—have been judged to be eradicable, while two others—rubella and mumps—were felt to be probably eradicable. Dr. Soper would no doubt be pleased that the