In 1928 Dr Frederick Russell, recently appointed Director of the International Health Division, reminded Dr Michael Connor, Director of the Health Division's Brazilian Yellow Fever Commission, of the Division's real objectives. ‘What we want to do’, he elaborated, ‘is to help each country establish a health organization suitable to the needs of the country … and we hope that the yellow fever work will lead to a better health organization in the states and in the nation of Brazil.’

That indeed was the original goal of the organisation founded in 1913 as a mirror of the older Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm Disease from the south. Using hookworm as their weapon, both organisations hoped to awaken public interest in (1) hygiene and sanitation by which hookworm could, it was hoped, be prevented and in (2) scientific medicine, which had revealed the cause and cure of the disease. By such means both Rockefeller organisations were then prepared to follow up their hookworm demonstration work by helping to set up local health agencies to promote health, hygiene and public sanitation. ‘The purpose of our work in any country is not to bring hookworm disease under control’, Wickliffe Rose, the organisation's first Director, noted in 1917, ‘but to make demonstrations which will lead ultimately to the enlistment of local agencies in the work.’