"Good Old Days" Return To MS In The Form Of Hookworm, Roundworm, Tapeworm; Small Survey Shows 38% Infestation Rate
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Dorsey and her family lived in Shaw, Mississippi, a town of 1,400 people about 110 miles (175km) north of Jackson. The area is plagued by sanitation problems – residents in Bolivar county filed half a dozen complaints to state officials just last year about wastewater leaks and burst pipes that have exposed them to raw sewage. Now, researchers warn that these problems are probably contributing to widespread intestinal infections and parasites such as hookworm, roundworm and tapeworm. “There’s this whole idea that the US eradicated these things [parasites],” said Tara Cepon-Robins, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. “But nobody actually eradicated anything.”
In fact, about 12 million Americans are believed to have “neglected” parasitic infections – called neglected because of their prevalence, disabling symptoms and links to poverty. These illnesses can spread through contaminated water and contact with feces and tend to thrive in high poverty areas with poor sanitation systems. Officials had previously believed that the US had rid itself of such parasites through investments in sanitation and public health, but in recent years research has revealed alarmingly high rates of infection, particularly in the south.
“These are chronic, debilitating conditions,” said Peter Hotez, dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College. Hotez, who has been studying neglected tropical diseases in the region since 2008, said Cepon-Robins and her colleagues’ findings were in line with what he expected. “It’s actually the poor living among the wealthy in G20 countries that account for most of the world’s neglected diseases,” he said.
Cepon-Robins and her team have been collecting blood and stool samples in Bolivar county since 2019 in an effort to show the impact of poor sanitation infrastructure on public health. The team’s results, published last year in the American Journal of Human Biology, were “concerning”, said Theresa Gildner, Cepon-Robins’s research partner. The researchers found that 38% of the children in their initial sample had intestinal parasitic infections and 80% had high levels of intestinal inflammation, a common symptom of parasites. (The first sample was of 24 children; they have since collected samples from 150 more residents, whose results are pending.) Those figures are on par with a landmark 2017 study, led by Hotez and his colleague Rojelio Mejia, that found more than a third of residents in Alabama’s Lowndes county tested positive for traces of hookworm.
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/01/mississippi-delta-water-parasites
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