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 Anti-Malaria Omnibus Issue Scott 326-329 (1962) On April 6, 1962, Vatican City issued a four-stamp set that has been entitled the Anti-Malaria Omnibus issue. The Vatican stamps were significant for a variety of reasons and were part of a worldwide push to eradicate the disease. At the 26th Session of the World Health Organization in 1960, it was discussed that the under-funded Malaria Eradication Special Account needed another way to finance the program. A proposal was forwarded to issue postage stamps on a worldwide basis in order to help fund the global program and to increase worldwide awareness and education about the disease and the efforts to fight malaria. It was hoped that the participating governments would contribute stamps or a percentage of the proceeds of the sales of the stamps to the program. The campaign did not achieve the lofty goal of eradicating either the insect vector, the Anopheles mosquito, or the disease. However, in 2022 about 619,000 people died worldwide as a result of malaria, considerably less than the 1-2 million people who died per year in the early 1960s. The Vatican participated in the campaign by issuing four stamps with two designs that commemorated anti-malaria projects undertaken during the pontificates of Pope Sixtus V (1566-1572) and Pope Pius VI (1775-1799). These projects focused on the draining of the Pontine Marshes, swamps located southeast of Rome. The swamps, labeled "fever-producing", were breeding grounds for the malaria-carrying Anopheles mosquitos. These marshes were also subject to flooding, causing road closures and difficult travel.  The history of the Pontine Marshes dates back almost 2000 years. The Marshes made up a tract of land of about 200,000 acres (over 300 square miles) in the Lazio Region of central Italy, extending along the coast southeast of Rome from just east of Anzio to Terracina, and inland between the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Volscian Mountains. The Via Appia, an ancient Roman military road dating to pre-Christian times, crosses the inland side of the former marsh. Over the years, from the time of the Roman Empire to the 20th century, efforts were attempted to drain the marsh, remove the risk of malaria spreading in the region, and to reclaim the land for settlement and agricultural uses. Perhaps the most successful effort to eradicate the Marshes took place during the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, who undertook the draining of the Marshes as a major public works project. VPS member Patrick Moore shares the following regarding the Marshes: “Draining the swamps was a huge and successful project launched by Mussolini in the 1920s. Land reclaimed was used for agriculture and a number of well-planned and well-designed towns. In the closing years of World War II, as Italy changed sides in the fall of 1943, Italy’s former German allies flooded the area in a futile effort to hold up the Allies’ advance despite pleas by the Italians not to do so. Malaria rates shot up again, and it took the UN and Italian government some time to get things back to where they were before the war began.”The Vatican stamps shown above were also the first to contain illustrations of maps and formed a basis for future joint stamp-issuing efforts between the Vatican and other countries to support worldwide relief efforts. These include the 1963 Freedom from Hunger Campaign and the 1964 Red Cross Centennial issue. There are other examples of such efforts over the intervening 60+ years of Vatican philately. Readers are directed to the link below to the article by James Hamilton on the Vatican Anti-Malaria issue, which illustrates stamps from some of the other countries that participated in the 1962 campaign. REFERENCES |
