Hookworm Returns as a Poverty-Related Disease
Hookworm falls under the umbrella of “neglected tropical diseases,” which don’t receive much attention and are associated with extreme poverty.
It’s not known precisely how many people have hookworm in the U.S. It’s not even clear how many are infected in Lowndes County, Alabama where a study published in 2017 found at least one-third of the homes with failing failing septic systems, and 15 percent without any system at all.…Lead investigator Rojelio Mejia had to walk from house to house, asking for stool samples and understandably few people wanted to provide them. In the end, he got samples from 55 people…One-third of the people tested had hookworm, a result that stunned the authors.
Not all the neglected diseases in America are associated with raw sewage. Others include toxocariasis, a parasitic worm infection transmitted from dogs and cats and thought to affect tens of millions of people, especially poor African-Americans; Chagas, a parasitic infection that may cause heart failure, infecting 300,000 across the country; as well as flu-like, mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue and chikungunya, which are growing threats in warmer climates. Zika, a mosquito-borne disease linked to severe birth defects, is sometimes included among these diseases, too.
There may be as many as 12 million Americans living with at least one neglected disease, according to Dr. Peter Hotez, an authority on these illnesses and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. Hotez considers the country’s poorest 20 million to be at greatest risk, and points to Texas, the Gulf Coast and the South as areas with especially vulnerable pockets of poverty.
Source: Anna Leah in Huffpost
