Gordon Covell

Major-General Sir Gordon Covell (20 October 1887 – 4 October 1975) was a physician and Indian Medical Service officer. He specialized in malaria disease control and eradication efforts and was a member of the expert committee on malaria set up by the WHO from 1948 to 1958, serving as its secretary. He was also an advisor to the British Ministry of Health and the Director of the Malaria Laboratory at Horton Hospital. After serving in World War I, he passed the DTM&H with distinction and received Doctor of Medicine in 1923.

Career Covell served as a doctor in the Indian Medical Service from 1914 until Indian independence, He was the first Assistant Director for the newly created Malaria Survey of India created in 1927 and subsequently became its Director succeeding the founding director, John Alexander Sinton. In a subsequent substantive account he published all known details of 137 species of Anopheles then known throughout the world with notes on their distribution, breeding and behaviour of all these.

He was particularly identified with successful malaria control programs in Bombay and Delhi, with his Delhi efforts being among the first to use large-scale insecticide spraying specifically targeting the adult stage of the vector. He was a proponent for a careful study of entomology, Anopheles species distribution and biting behaviour of the mosquito vector in determining success of disease control efforts and urged for looking beyond use of DDT and insecticides only in malaria eradication. In 1952, he was invited by the then imperial government Ethiopia to study the malaria situation in southern part of the country around Lake Tana. He planned studies and collected baseline malaria on distribution of malaria prevalence, spleen rates and dominant vectors in Gondar, Jimma, Awash River valley and the Kobbo Chercher plain. This was amongst the first few systematic epidemiological investigations of malaria at different parts of the country, laying the foundations for a nationwide malaria control efforts.

On May 6, 1953, he delivered the Cutter talk on preventive medicine at the Harvard school of public health.

Awards He was awarded the Darling Medal by the World Health Organization in 1951 instituted in the memory of Samuel Taylor Darling. The American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene awarded the Walter Reed Medal to him on November 4, 1960 in absentia . He was awarded the Manson Medal in 1971.

Works

Malaria Control by Anti-mosquito Measures, 1941 How to Do a Malaria Survey, 1928 Medical Research (History of the Second World War series, co-edited with F. H. K. Green), 1953