Are parasites holding back economic development?

It’s a contentious time in America. Between fighting over health care, over terrorists and TSA regulations, and dealing with standard-issue holiday stress, we all seem to be teetering on our last nerves. So for my debut column at When Falls the Coliseum, I’ve decided to start 2010 on an uncontroversial note and champion a cause we all can get behind.

Take a moment to list some of the greatest problems plaguing the world’s poorest people today. Most people get through “big name” diseases like malaria, TB, and AIDS, lack of technological and physical infrastructure, government corruption, and the like, before reaching (if they even get this far) a slew of ailments, mostly caused by parasitic worms, which can greatly impair individual productivity without being fatal. Such “neglected tropical diseases” are the subject of an article by Peter Jay Hotez ^[1] in the current (January 2010) edition of Scientific American. The strength of one billion people worldwide is sapped by NTDs, leaving their countries’ economies reeling from the impact.

While NTDs are mostly limited to impoverished nations in the tropics today, the effect of one of these diseases may have shaped the development of the United States, and its example can serve as a model for the havoc caused by these nonfatal conditions. By the early 20^th century, the Civil War and Reconstruction had rolled through the South, but productivity in the region still lagged behind the rest of the country. It was later discovered that around 40% of children in the South suffered from hookworm infections which made them anemic, listless, and unprepared to build an economy which didn’t break the backs of slaves. Starting in 1910, an effort promoted by the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission ^[2] helped eradicate hookworm infection from the South, with dramatic results depicted in a 1915 report from Virginia ^[3] (page 7 in linked pdf):

…children who could not study a year ago are not only studying now, but are finding joy in learning. These children were born of anemic parents; were themselves infected in infancy; for the first time in their lives their cheeks show the glow of health.

A century later, one-sixth of the world’s population has suffered in the same way. Just as was the case in the American South, a cure for the scourge of NTDs is at hand, and may even prime a generation of thinkers who can reverse global economic malaise. The Scientific American article names an effort called the Just 50 Cents Campaign ^[4]; so-called because a 50-cent donation is enough to treat one person for the seven most common NTDs for a year. It’s startling to think that such small change is all that is needed to restore “the glow of health” in people so poor that they’ve never been able to think and work to their full inborn potential.