ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that an important public health value of mosquito-control technologies comes from the ambivalence they produce in the humans who use them or interact with them. Through anthropological fieldwork among front-line mosquito control workers in Central America who use larvicides to control Aedes aegypti, the chapter suggests that the call to kill mosquitoes can—under certain circumstances—induce an appreciation of the complexity of the worlds shared and shaped by people, insects and microbes. In fact, under certain circumstances, tracking and killing mosquitoes can be pleasurable. That pleasure can translate into a sustained commitment to public health in its broadest sense: not only management of arboviruses or malaria, but also improved infrastructure, reduction in crime, and access to food and water, among other things. Drawing on anthropological critiques of both ambitious mega-projects and more modest health interventions, this study finds that eradication is ineffective not because it is categorically unethical or ecologically catastrophic, but because it artificially seeks to insulate public health from the messy realities of social life and politics. Eradication fails as a public health measure precisely because it forecloses the possibility of ambivalence.
