From the 1930s, Asia was at the forefront of an international push for development. Across the region, there was an emphasis on tackling infectious diseases, particularly in the period after the Second World War, which witnessed anti-colonial struggles in many Asian countries and the rise of ambitious global programs of disease prevention. In April 1948, the Health Organization of the League of Nations was transformed into the WHO, reflecting an optimism about the prospect of controlling infectious diseases by deploying the tools of modern biomedicine and public health, especially antibiotics, vaccines, and drugs, as well as DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), an insecticide widely used to combat malaria. Eradication – the ‘reduction of the worldwide incidence of a disease to zero as a result of deliberate efforts’ – became the avowed goal of international health organizations and national governments. In 1972, the virologist and Nobel laureate Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet (1899–1985) posed the question, ‘On the basis of what has happened in the last thirty years, can we forecast any likely developments for the 1970s?’ To which he answered: ‘If for the present we retain a basic optimism and assume no major catastrophes occur and that any wars are kept at the “brush fire” level, the most likely forecast about the future of infectious disease is that it will be very dull.’

Post-Second World War optimism was embodied in the Declaration of Alma-Ata, the outcome of an international conference convened in September 1978 in Kazakhstan. In the Declaration, WHO member-states along with numerous international organizations affirmed the UN's definition of health as a ‘fundamental human right’ and launched a global campaign of ‘Health for All by the Year 2000.’ As the science journalist Laurie Garrett has observed, ‘The goal was nothing less than pushing humanity through what was termed the “health transition,” leaving the age of infectious disease permanently behind.’

There was political significance in the decision to hold the conference in Kazakhstan, a Central Asian country with a common border with China, which was then part of the Soviet Union. Given global health disparities, the WHO had studied a number of developing countries that had successfully implemented local-level health campaigns. In particular, China's national ‘barefoot doctors’ policy from the late 1960s influenced WHO's global Health for All program.