Fighting Hookworm In Alabama: Easier And Harder Than In Low Resource Countries : Goats and Soda - NPR

When hookworm eggs land on moist, warm ground, via human feces, they develop into larvae, raise their tiny selves upward, and wave back and forth, looking for bare feet to latch onto.

Hookworm disease flourishes in hot, moist climates where people have limited access to water, inadequate sewage systems and poor hygiene.

Rojelio Mejia, infectious disease specialist at Baylor College of Medicine, says the parasites are no strangers to U.S.

In a paper published in 2017, Mejia and his team reported finding more than a third of the people in one Alabama county were infected with hookworm disease.

Rojelio Mejia, infectious disease specialist at Baylor College of Medicine, says the parasites are no strangers to U.S.

Mejia and his team have found that more than a third of the people in one Alabama county were infected with hookworm disease.

Mejia has worked to quell hookworm disease in Ecuador, Mozambique, the grassy plains of northern Argentina, and now, he and partners are leading efforts to control the outbreak in rural Alabama?

We talked with him by telephone about the disease and the various struggles the U.S.

It needs moist, loamy soil — the same type of soil found in Alabama, the plains of Argentina and other places with hookworm.

And it requires poor sanitation conditions where human waste gets into the soil.

Public health people have talked about hookworm the 1800s.

In the 1900s, a study in some counties in Alabama found about 60 percent of people had hookworm — mostly African-Americans and poor whites.

The Rockefeller Foundation funded a project to try to eradicate hookworm, and studies in the 1950s, showed the infection rate was about 40 percent, not just in Alabama, but throughout the South?

But in recent years, because interest had apparently waned, hookworm studies in the U.S.

We studied rural Alabama and found about 35 percent of people in one county are infested with hookworm.

(The study, "Human Intestinal Parasite Burden and Poor Sanitation in Rural Alabama," was published in October 2017, in American Journal of Tropical Medicine )?

The only recent human studies have been done in Alabama.

What are the symptoms and long-term consequences of hookworm infection.

If we could provide better sanitation systems, we could curb the infection rate, but there's not enough money to pay for septic systems in many parts of the world.

[But in rural Alabama, thanks to a new collaboration between researchers at the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Co., children with hookworm infection will receive the drugs at greatly reduced cost.].

Are there unique difficulties in doing research in poor, rural areas of the U.S..

It's all about poor sanitation, about poverty.

In Alabama, it's illegal not to have a septic system.

But it's hilly and it rains, so the hookworm eggs end up getting spread throughout the environment.