March 16, 2017 • 48 mins
There was a time when the lower classes of the American South were considered lazy and dimwitted, a stereotype that still somewhat survives today. But this stereotype was rooted in fact. Hookworms, it turns out, were sapping Southerners’ life force.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, March is tripod month, my friend, and you know
what that means. Yes, that means it's time to let
people know about your favorite podcasts, just to share the
sheer joy of podcast listening. That's right, it's t r
y pod still in nascent industry. A lot of people
don't know what podcasts are and helps everybody out if
(00:20):
you would go out and just say, hey, family member,
who I see it? Thanksgiving once a year? Right, you
should try out this thing called a podcast. Here's what
they are, here's a cool show you should try, and
here's how to get it. Yeah, and it doesn't have
to be our show, just any podcast you like in
general that you think someone else would like to share it. Yeah,
So get on board the dry pod train. Welcome to
(00:44):
stuff you should know from how stuff works dot com. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W.
Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry Rowland. She goes she just ran
away after nine years. I knew that would happen eventually. Yep.
(01:07):
She had a little bendel sack over her shoulder and
she's barefoot, which is dangerous. Jerry, that was a nice
little set up. Yeah, you might get uh, what do
you call it? The do itch? Yeah? Or well that's
the best one, the ground itch do, which is way
better than ground get a little discomfort in the webbing
(01:31):
between your toes, a little scratchy. Maybe a few days
later you're like, this is this athlete's foot. No, that
doesn't make you cough. Yeah, Plus you're no athlete. Don't
flatter yourself, that's what they would say. And then you
start coughing a little bit, and a few weeks after that,
you're just a big dope that can't lift an arm
(01:53):
to go stand up and do anything. You have hookworm? Yeah, uh,
well there you have it. Were you told as a child,
like you'll get worms? And you're gonna ask me that
because I grew up in the South, Well, no, I
mean I was told that too. I don't remember hearing
this stuff. I remember being scared about uh, scoliosis, and
(02:18):
I remember being scared about nuclear annihilation and so as
I um, and that's about it. Razors and apples at Halloween, yeah,
which is, as we've covered, not true. Any instance that
happened to that happened because of the urban legend. Not Uh. No,
(02:42):
I've never really heard of this, and what made you
think of this? By the way, I don't know you
like the parasites. I love parasites. They're interesting, especially this
particular parasite, because it turns out the hookworm might be
the most interesting of all of the parasitic war here
on planet Earth if you ask me, Well, agreed, because,
(03:04):
as you will see, the social context and the Southern
United States of what the hookworm meant over centuries never
knew about it. And it's pretty astounding. And as someone
who has long had to defend the South as not
just a backward place with a bunch of dumb yokels,
I'm just gonna from now on, I'm just gonna say, hookworm.
(03:25):
Look it up. Listen to our episode, and people right
now are going, what in the world, So let's well,
let's get into it. Let's remove their the fog of
curiosity and maybe irritation a little bit and start talking
about hookworms. Right, so we said you it starts with
your foot. Yeah, these are round worms. Yes, they're a
(03:47):
type of round worm, a nematode, right, yeah, Nematode phyl
um um. They're pretty young, about four million years old,
and uh, they have been described in this article you
sent most commonly as a as far as the way
they look as a tube within a tube like a
(04:07):
pair of socks. And then at one end, right at
one end, they have cutting plates also called fangs or teeth. Mouthparts, yeah, mouthparts,
and as Tracy Wilson would put it, and um, they
use those things for sucking blood. So that they want
is your blood because they get nutrients from your blood
(04:30):
and that makes them parasites. Yeah, and they as as
we sourced a few really great articles on this, but um,
as one of them points out to that a good
parasite or a good hookworm doesn't want to kill you because,
as it says in this article, that means the ride
is over right exactly. They want to keep you alive
(04:53):
and lazy so they can just keep reproducing and keep
sucking on your blood forever and ever and ever. And
in a very large part, hookworms have covald with humans,
and they've done so in a way that they get
the maximum benefit out of infecting a human um without
(05:15):
the pitfall of killing the human and ending the ride
for themselves. Right. So um, and they've had four hundred
million years to do it, and there's two kinds of hookworms. Mainly,
there's tons of hookworms, Like from what I understand, just
about every animal, every mammal has its own type of hookworm,
but they don't infect cross animal typically, And there's two
(05:37):
types of hookworms that infects humans specifically. There's the new
world hookworm naricatur Americana is very open minded, and then
there's the old word world hookworm uh and Solostoma duoden
all a right, and so both of them thrive in warmer,
(06:01):
tropical ish climates. And the an AMERICANUS in particular loves
sandy loami soil, and it just so happens that in
the American South has just the kind of climate to
host an American it's and it's around. Yeah, so here's
what happens. We were kind of kidding around about Jerry
(06:23):
walking around barefoot, but Jerry's old like me, and she
grew up in the South. We were all we all
come from sharecroppers and UH had outhouses. So here's what
would happen um all the way up until like which
is kind of distressing. Yeah, I thought so too. You
could walk around barefoot as uh Southern children were wanted
(06:46):
to do. Yeah, Apparently the chances of your of being
a kid with shoes, especially in the rural south, was
like next to nothing up until that, maybe the fifties
or sixties. Really yeah, uh so they would, like we
talked about the do uh the do it. You would
walk around barefoot. These little guys would get between your toes, uh,
(07:10):
root into your body through the feet, make their way
to the blood vessels and start the voyage to the lungs.
This is it's a fantastic voyage. Well for them, it is.
Um it's like inner space, yeah, um, up through the lungs,
finally through the circulatory system to the lungs where eventually,
like you said, you then you cough it up with
(07:33):
a dry cough, and then you swallow it into your
gut and the intestine and that's when it's like, this
is where I wanted to be all along. And the
nuts they go up through the foot circulatory system to
the lungs, make you cough, then you swallow them, and
then they finally get to the place where they're supposed
to be, the small intestine, and they latch on and
they start second blood. Yeah. And hookworms are interesting tape
(07:56):
worms or hermaphroditic. But hookworms like a lot of around worms. Uh,
they need to do it. Yeah, it's about to say
they like to who knows, maybe a little bit both,
depending on the mood. They have to in order to reproduce.
So what you do is they get into that intestine,
they find a lover, they take a lover. Excuse me,
(08:17):
Robert lamb in here, they take a lover, and then
they attach theirselves to the intestinal wall and say, I'm
here forever, I'm gonna I mean up to I've seen
up to thirty thousand eggs a day. Right, the female
will will lay thirty thousand fertilized eggs a day. Right,
And that's on the highest end. But you know, let's
(08:38):
say the low end is ten thousand, and say the
low end is a thousand. It's still a lot of eggs.
And that's just one female worm. Right. You can have
dozens hundreds of these things. They found that, Um, the
human can host up to about five hundred worms and survive.
You're not living a very fulfilling life, as we'll see,
(09:01):
but um, you you could have a number of these
worms all pumping out eggs, and the worm typically lives
between one and five years in the comforts of your gut,
and then um, you can also be reinfected. And here's
how right, So, when the females are spreading out a
thousand to thirty thousand eggs take your pick on a
(09:22):
daily basis, you're pooping those eggs out. And if you're
pooping and say like uh, like by the bushes or
in some sort of like outhouse, Yeah, it's eighteen seventy
five in West Virginia. You don't have indoor plumbing, right,
and let's say your outhouse isn't all that great, or
you're just again pooping in the bushes. You are probably
(09:44):
not wearing shoes. Those two things usually go hand in hand.
And so you're stepping in your old fecal material that's
still had eggs in it before those eggs have since
hatched into larva. Larva gone through the first two larval stages,
entered the third infective larval stage, and now it's crawling
up into your foot again and you're what's called worm
(10:06):
burden is expanded even further from one or two to
ten to twenty two up to hundreds. Yeah, and that's
if you just accidentally step in old pooh, whether it's
like spread around by animals walking around or by the rain. Um,
the chances of are exponentially more if you have a
good old fashioned poop slanging fight, sure do you You
(10:30):
know you don't want to get hit in the mouth
with that. God. Um. The other problem that um, well,
it was part of the problem was that, uh, that
was the second version of that even was that people
were using poop as fertilizer. Now it's one thing again
you can't really catch I'm sure you can catch some worms.
(10:50):
I know trick nosis is a problem for humans and
that's a pork worm. Um. But you you using say,
horse manure is real satively safe compared to using human
manure as fertilizer in your field. That's a relatively recent discovery.
People were using human manure as fertilizer for very a
(11:11):
very very long time. And it was called night soil
because at night the guys would come out and clean
your your privy out and walk them muck your poop,
your FeCO material down the street and collect more and
collect more, and then they would turn it into fertilizer.
Would say release the night soil before they dumped it
(11:32):
exactly and it would be fertilizer, and that'd be great
to make a crops grow, but it also just contaminate
your entire field with hookworms. And then little kids would
go out and work the field shoeless and they would
become infected from that too. So there were all these
really great opportunities for people to become infected by hookworms.
(11:54):
But there the hookworm habitat followed a certain a certain
line from about West Virginia down to I think East Texas. Uh.
And beneath that line that was the hookworm belt. Yeah,
they called it that, and above it they used human
manure for fertilizer too, but they didn't have hookworm. It
(12:16):
was in the South that the hookworm was a problem,
and it was a big problem, it turned out. Yeah,
it just occurred to me. We walked right past maybe
the best band name of all time in here, what
worm burden? Oh yeah, Wormburdon is pretty good. Um. All right,
well that's the the setup, uh, before we hit you
(12:36):
with a social context. So let's take a little break
here and we'll talk a little bit more about my
old kin folk right after this. All right, So before
(13:08):
we broke, we talked about what the hookworm is and
all the different, uh myriad ways which it could spread,
from accidentally walking in poop to poop slanging fights. Night
Soil Nights released the night soil rolling in it to
ultimate radically increase your worm burden. Um. So you found
(13:29):
this great article called how a Worm Gave the South
a Bad Name by a woman named Rachel Newer. Um.
It's on Nova. Yeah, it was really good. And she
is from the South and kind of wrote it from
that point of view. Um, and I get the feeling, like,
like me, she kind of his long head to defend
the American South as hey, we're not a bunch of dumb,
(13:50):
lazy yokels. Because that was you know, for a long time. Um,
and still continuing today to a certain degree. Yeah, that
notion kind of this that if you're from the South,
you're kind of slow, you may be a little dim witted,
you may be lazy. And this was you know, for
white folks, Black folks, Native Americans, just something about the
(14:11):
South made you lazy and dumb, especially among the lower
socioeconomic classes. And this wasn't just like off the cuff
um stereotyping. It was rooted in fact, in reality, there
was something different about people of a of the lower
socioeconomic classes in the South. Specifically, if you put them
(14:34):
side by side among the same socioeconomic classes of the North,
the ones in the North would be like, let's shovel
some cold baby, and the ones in the South would
be like, I'm just gonna lay here down next to
my wheelbarrow because I can't I can't get up. And
so Southerners were came to be seen as lazy, shiftless,
(14:54):
couldn't be trusted to do an honest day's work, and
they just thought it was part of the Southern character. Yeah,
and this wasn't just um a perception like they literally
lagged behind the North in terms of productivity, um economic development. Uh.
And we'll you know, we'll talk about some of these
statistics as we go. Well. Plus the Civil War didn't
(15:16):
help anything either. Well, now, that was obviously a big setback,
right So, and it would have been for any region
right at level of devastation and um um death. But
coupled with their already predisposition to this, that what what
came to be called the lazy germ uh it was,
(15:39):
it just set it back even further. Yeah, and at
one point in the American South up to fort Amazingly,
the population, like you said, from southeastern Texas to West
Virginia and all the way down, um was infected with hookworm. Yes,
that's a lot of people. I mean, it's obviously not
a majority, almost a majority. That would have would have
(16:03):
been a tomb Southerner. I mean, that's a lot of folks.
It is a lot of folks. And that was the
culprit behind this lazy shiftlessness among the poverty stricken Southern
poor and the rural. The poverty stricken, rural Southern poor
(16:23):
was apparently the majority of the South from the end
of the Civil War up until the I believe the
mid nineties or mid twentieth century. Um you were if
you were a Southerner, it was likely that you were
poor and did not live in the city until about
the forties. And there's a pretty clear demarcation line if
(16:43):
you did if you were wealthy in the South, or
you were lived in the city in the South in
the nineteenth and early twentieth century, you wore shoes, you
had bed pans um, and you could probably avoid this.
But if you didn't like those are It says in
this article that it was almost impossible to avoid if
(17:04):
you were poor and lived in the South, because you
also didn't have very good sanitation. No, you were just
it was just perfectly set up for you to keep
getting reinfected. Um. You know, every couple of years you
shed a dead hookworm, but in that time you probably
would have taken on several more. All right, so what
(17:26):
does this mean If you get hookworm, Like we said,
it's it's likely not going to directly kill you. Uh,
you might die from a common cold. Um, you might
die from malaria or typhoid fever, or you know, something
else may ultimately take you out because your body is
so weakened. But what it does in large part is
it causes an iron deficiency. Uh. If you're a pregnant
(17:48):
woman or a kid, iron deficiency is really bad. Um.
If you're a child, you need that iron for your
brain development. So you know, not only would you get
like physical sin terms like stomach bloat. Uh what what
was the uh the I thing like this the dull,
fishy stair fishy i'd stare. Yeah, just sort of like
(18:09):
they're basically described, these kids just sort of vacant, just
staring off into space. Um, so you know, some of
those are physical symptoms, but others were literally like a
lower i Q. Right, And so they believed that an
AMERICANUS came over as a result of the Atlantic slave trade,
that it was imported from Africa. So for centuries generations
(18:31):
of kids, um we're being born in the South who
had there, Um, they were physically and developmentally stunted. Yeah,
by hookworm infections. Yeah, it's sometimes girls wouldn't begin menstruation,
boys a lot of times would not even hit their
(18:52):
growth spurts. And not only where they had lower i
q s and learning uh you know, development disability ease,
but they were smaller and weaker. Yeah, and then you
combine this loss of blood. So so apparently about a
hundred worms in a in a normal adult will drink
about a teaspoon a day, which doesn't sound like that much,
(19:13):
but if you couple it that level of iron deficiency
with uh pre existing malnourishment due to poverty or the
lack of availability of like good food, Uh, then it
really becomes a huge problem. And it goes from like
this is a problem to this is this is a
catastrophic problem that can keep an entire region of a
(19:35):
country down projectivity productively. Yeah, and it uh like a
lot of disease we've talked about, whether it's like famine
or lack of clean water. It's it's cyclical in nature.
So it would occur where there was poverty, and then
it would keep people from working to work their way
out of poverty, and it just kind of compounded on
(19:56):
each other. Right, and then think about slavery as well. Right,
So not only have you been brought over to the
US as a slave, you're being forced to work against
your will in these horrific conditions. You're also being forced
to work and live in the same conditions that promotes hookworm.
So you're feeling lazy and shiftless. Ts for you you're
a slave. Add that to your toil and misery, you know,
(20:19):
like it just it just keeps getting worse. All right.
So I think we've made it clear, big problem in
the South, But again, no one had any idea why. Yeah,
it was just you know, the lazy South, and it's
you know, people have said that it literally set the
South back like decades and decades from the rest of
the country. No one knows what's going on. Until nineteen
(20:42):
o two, this dude came along and they should be
kind of a weird movie to market, but this would
be a good movie, I think. Oh, I think that's
the story of Charles Styles and Hookworm. It's a big
roller coaster ride, all right. So, uh, nineteen o two,
this guy named Charles Styles comes along. He's a zoologist
from from New York City, educated in Europe, no less.
(21:04):
So he played real well in the South, yeah, which,
as you'll see, it was a bit of part of
the problem. Uh. And the Department of Agriculture said, hey,
we need you to help these farmers down there keep
their animals healthy. So go down there and check things out.
And he was like he started to notice. He's like,
something's going on. These people are physically stunted. They're a
little off. Yeah, they're mentally stunted. And I don't think
(21:26):
they're just dumb and lazy. So he started apparently he
sounds like one of these guys that was just had
to get to the bottom of it something, you know,
Like he wouldn't just say, you know, oh, well everyone's
right about how it is down here. So he really
stuck to his instinct and realized that it was hookworm.
(21:48):
He literally was the guy who discovered that that was
the problem exactly. I think he um he did that
by analyzing stool samples. So he basically just hung around
men's rooms. He said, like, you're going to use that,
and they'd say, no, have at it. He just exactly,
and the people would just walk away. All right. It
(22:12):
went down. I don't know how it went down. I looked, Actually,
this guy is not the most celebrated person to ever
save an entire region from an infection. Um So, there's
not I didn't find a lot of background information on
him in particular. Um So, I have no idea how
it happened. I saw somewhere that said that he became
(22:33):
accidentally infected, and that's how he understood. Didn't see it
backed up anywhere else. I have no idea how this
man came to say, because again, you gotta you have
to be trading in fecal material here. So like this
guy had his hands on human poop at some point
(22:53):
or thought to look there. I'm not sure. Maybe he
was in a good old fashioned poops. It makes the
most sense that he he was. He's like, something's going
on to god, oh it's a worm. Uh. The point is,
though he was not well received. The local doctors didn't
want to hear it. They wouldn't listen. They dismissed him
as you know, this this carpet bag and yankee from Europe,
(23:18):
who you know, educated in Europe, who's down here telling us,
you know, he's he's an animal expert, and he's telling
us about our poop, making us lazy europe animal expert. Yeah,
they they really didn't listen to him much. So he
was like, fine, I'll just go to John de rock
Feller and tell him. I'm gonna tell on you. That's
basically what happened. Yeah, Rockefeller was this is at the
(23:40):
time when income inequality was about at the levels it
was now, and the wealthy industrialists of the age were
really really worried that they were going to have the
social order overthrown by angry people, so they invented philanthropy. Right. Yeah,
this is back when they worried about that kind of thing, right,
And Rockefeller said, well, we can't just we can't do
(24:01):
anything to actually support the problems that capitalism creates, because
then we'll just be drawing attention to the fact that
there are major problems with capitalist system. What else can
I support, and he heard about Styles, and Styles took
a meeting with Rockefeller and some of his his uh
higher up friends, and apparently at that meeting they closed
(24:24):
the deal, like we're funding this thing with the million
bucks right out of the gate, which is about twenty
six million today. And they set up the Rockefeller Sanitary
Commission for the Eradication of hookworm disease. That's right. But um,
despite the fact that they were trying to help Southerners, um,
(24:45):
not only with a medical issue, but to advance themselves
as a people. Um. Again, the Southerners A they didn't
want a light being shown on this problem because it's gross,
uh and it has a stigma. But they didn't want
um again. They didn't want these Yankees coming down there
and saying they can fix you, right, you know. And
(25:06):
Rockefeller said t s he said, I've got an oyster
dish named after me, maybe the best oyster dish besides raw.
I'm glad you said that. Uh. Should we take a break, Yeah,
all right, We're gonna come back and talk a little
bit about the road to eradication right after this. What
(25:50):
I mean, your body don't do what I mean, your
body don't do you and We're back and Chuck, we
had a not just a jingle that was a real
(26:13):
blues song. Yeah, people are like, man, somebody really made
an authentic old blue sounding jingle just for this episode. No,
that was the legendary Blind Blake with his song Hookworm Blues,
which was a real song about the hookworm blues. Right.
And I think blind Blake came up with that song
in ninety six, I believe. And the fact that he
(26:36):
is singing about hookworms um starting in the nineteen twenties
represents It just goes to show like how much progress
was made between the time the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission was
set up and Blind Blake had his number one hit,
his number one and in between that time for for
(27:00):
promoting this idea that there was such thing as hookworm
and that it was a real problem. Because when the
Rockefeller Sanitary Commission was set up in nineteen o nine,
the South was still and basically the grips of reconstruction.
It wasn't the reconstruction era anymore is the Jim Crow South,
but it was still really far behind as a result
(27:22):
of the war, and there were not a lot of
public services available. So one thing the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission
had going for it was money and then it was
going to be money invested in public health. All right,
So this is how they went about it. Uh it's
nineteen o nine. And like you said, they Rockefeller donated
a million bucks, which is how much today? It's pretty good. Um,
(27:48):
And they realized, well, I don't assume this was kind
of a purposeful move, um that they got a Southerner
on board to kind of lead the charge. Definitely. Um,
this person named Wickliffe Rose, great name. If there's a
hero of the story, it's him. If you asked me,
you think so not? What's his face? No? Styles? Yeah, alright,
(28:09):
I mean he did some great work. It was good,
But Whitecliffe Rose was the one who uh Whitecliffe. That's
how I've pronounced that he was the one who made
it happen, because because Styles could have discovered hookworm all
day long, but if he didn't have the personality to
to write cure people, then that doesn't really help. So
(28:30):
this would be Matthew McConaughey then in the movie. Yeah so,
and and the s would be Paul Giamatti. And this
is McConaughey coming in now. Uh So they get this
Southerner east from Nashville on board to run the organization.
And they had this approach where they would go to
(28:51):
a town that they would go to a town in
the South with these doctors. But before they did that,
they would start this UM campaign, like an awareness campaign
UM and schools to get and as I think we
talked about in other things, you get the kids on
board in schools, and they kind of helped get the
parents on board, and they started this campaign to tell
children about what's going on, and the kids would in
(29:13):
turn hopefully go home and tell their parents like, you know,
my pa, I ain't dumb, I got the hookworm. Look
my poop is wiggling away exactly, and um it was.
You know, they had a challenge in front of him because, um,
you know, you gotta poop in a bag or something
and give it to your teacher. Your teacher and entire schools,
(29:37):
these one room schoolhouses were infected. And this this one
kid they talked to later on said, uh, well he
was at the time. Well yeah, he was scared. Like
he said, he had constipation for a week. He didn't
want to like you didn't want to have hookworm. I
don't want my teacher to know me in this way. Yeah,
pretty much, sap um way. Never mind. But that was
(30:02):
but that was the whole setup, right yeah. I mean
like there was there was There was a public information
campaign that was part of it. There was community involvement.
That was a really big thing. That why Cliff Rose started.
He said, we can't do this without the support of
the local community. So they built networks with like doctors
and local health boards. They got the schools involved, um,
(30:24):
and it became a community thing, right. Yeah. So once
you had the public on board, they would set up
these clinics, um not permanent, these kind of temporary clinics,
and they would It was kind of a big deal
in the town. It said that they have a treat
it like an event, and people would bring picnics. I
don't know that's a wise thing to do at a
(30:45):
hookworm clinic, but they would bring picnics. And it says
in here that they some people even wanted to get
married in the hookworm tent, and I was like, that
seems weird and kind of like kitchy. But then I
also was like, I'll bet a lot of these people
have never seen the tent before, so they were like, yeah, yeah,
can we get married in the hookworm tent? And so, um,
(31:08):
there'd be this public information campaign leading up to the
day of the hookworm Day you can just call it.
And right, young a young doctor would ride into town
on horseback and he had a microscope and everything he
would Um, there was a couple of parts to it.
There was, um, the sanitation lecture, which was, here's how
(31:32):
you guys are getting cookworm. Here's how you build what's
called the sanitary privy. Yeah, like they couldn't give him
indoor plumbing, but they could at least teach them how
to have a nice enough out house, right. And there's
some very very simple principle. One is like don't don't
dig your latrine down until you hit groundwater, don't let
it go out into the stream, make sure animals can't
(31:54):
get into it, and like spread it around, make sure
your feet aren't standing in the same pit that you're
pooping in. It's really basic stuff, but like that was
a big part of it, right, Um. And then also
explaining how the infection process worked. Right, So because they
understood very early on, um that yes, you can get
(32:15):
rid of hook worms fairly easily, but you can also
get reinfected fairly easy, so they had to get that
part across as well. Yeah, and like again, you can't
buy everyone's shoes, but you can say, maybe don't play
near the outhouse. You gotta stop the poop slinging fights
all together. Yeah, they just have to be gone the
thing in the past. That's the number one thing. They're
(32:35):
part of the salad days. And then this the sample
analysis would begin, and the poor doctor would just look
with his microscope at each poop sample and say past fail,
pass fail. Well, and if the bag was vibrating, they
didn't even have to look. Yeah, like that that cheese
in Sardinia, I think that with the maggots, the maggot cheese.
(32:59):
Didn't we talk about a maggot episode, Sure we did.
We're both so Um. If you were found to be
infected with worms, you would get very simple, um pharmaceutical treatment,
really simple. There's this extraordinarily toxic stuff called thyme all yeah,
(33:22):
t H y m L Yeah. And it would kill
your worms. Yeah, and it could also kill you if
you took it with the wrong combination of foods or
and or alcoholic beverages. You wanted to avoid alcohol and
fats and oils on the day you took it, and
then you would follow your dose of thyme all with
epsom salt, which would remove the thyme all from your body. Yeah,
(33:45):
and uh, they said at some point, you know what,
that stuff is super toxic, so why don't we replace
that with something called carbon tectric chloride um That must
be much better. Now. It was also very lethal, I
guess it. You know, at the time didn't have anything
that wasn't also dangerous to take, right, and that did
(34:07):
the trick And the fact that the epsom salt would
get rid of it, I think helped quite a bit. Yeah.
So the great end of this story would be if
the Rockefeller's money was well spent and five to ten
years later they eradicated hookworm in the South. But that
didn't happen. Um. It was successful in a lot of ways.
Awareness kind of be in the chief way, but as
(34:30):
we said a few times, um reinfection is kind of
the biggest problem. Like you, they might have gotten rid
of a lot of hookworm, only you know, to have
these kids who couldn't help but have their poops slanging fights, uh,
and then get hookworm all over again exactly and so.
But if you go and read the Rockefeller's um the
Rockefeller Foundations um rundown of that program, they basically say
(34:55):
it was this one guy who lobbied hard to like
just move on. Whatever it was somebody from the Rockfeller
found that said we're done with this. We've done our
work right. And they had, like you said, in a
certain way, they had set up some of the earliest
public health networks in the South. They had convinced the
South that there was such thing as hookworm and that
(35:15):
it was a big problem and that if they were
able to get rid of it, they could um catch
up to the rest of the country. And they said,
now the local doctors, now the local health clinics can
take over from here. But again, yeah, it wasn't until
the forties that that hookworm really started to be eradicated,
and it had very little to do with the pharmaceutical treatments.
(35:37):
It was the fact that indoor plumbing became prevalent, or
I mean it was literally like better food, better plumbing,
more shoes, the end of share cropping, which was a
type of um agricultural system that kept people poor and
kept people in the fields. So it was it kept
the same unsanitary conditions for hookworm infection right there. Yeah,
(36:00):
what did you call it when they would dump the
poop night night soil? Yeah, no more night soil dumping. Uh,
mechanization started and it was kind of a combination of
all these Just the modernization of the American South is
really what ended it. Um. And you know, the proof
is kind of in the pudding in that today in
(36:20):
conditions similar to the American South a hundred years ago
plus in other parts of the world, it's still a
really big problem. It is a really problem, apparently something
like I saw up to um. In this article The
War on Hookworms by Andy Borrowitz, he says that up
to something like seven hundred and forty million people around
(36:43):
the world are thought to have hookworm infections, right yeah,
about forty to fifty million, of which are pregnant women,
which is you know, obviously one of the uh, one
of the worst. Like we said, kids and pregnant women
is one of the worst kind of people to get
to end the status, right and uh, mainly because it
increases your chances of dying during childbirth because of anemia. Right. Um,
(37:08):
So it is a huge problem around the world. There's there.
There's this kind of moniker for um hookworm infection along
with certain other infections. They're lumped together under the umbrella
of neglected tropical diseases. And the reason they're called that
is because this is stuff that, like you can easily
get rid of if you alleviate poverty in the the
(37:33):
developing world. But we're not doing that, and it's out
a neglect basically. Yeah, it's not. It's not the kind
of thing where you can just invent the vaccine and
it's gone again because of the reinfection, because these people
are still poor and still in those conditions. Um, we're talking.
It's some of the highest rates are Sierra Leone, Democratic
(37:54):
Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Ethiopia, India, Venezuela, Indonesia. UM also interestingly, UM,
China in Brazil, which kind of surprised me. Yeah, well
it's the same thing is like the South back in
the day, where you have very very um or well
off urban areas and very very very poor rural areas.
(38:15):
The same thing in parts of China and Brazil today. Yeah.
And I think another reason, Um, at least this article
you sent kind of makes the argument that it's uh
still a problem. In fact, since nine it's declined globally
by just five Yes, despite the fact that something like
four hundred and fifty million people have been treated for hookworm,
(38:38):
but that declines, it's only gone down five percent. And
all what that's saying is as long as there's the
unsanitary conditions, there's going to be hookworm, right, so we
have to alleviate the unsanitary conditions, and you do that
by alleviating poverty. And there's a group of of foundations
like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, World Health Organization,
(38:59):
they've gotten together to create this End seven program, and
that's they're trying to end seven of the neglected tropical
diseases by and hookworm is one of them. And there's treatments.
There's it's really easy to get rid of hookworm. There's
actually a couple of ironic treatments for hookworm. One medication
for getting rid of hookworm UM prevents the hookworms from
(39:24):
creating a t P, which is like an energy source,
so they become lethargic and die just like they make
you lethargic. The other medication, UM attaches the to the
hookworms intestines and prevents the hookworm from absorbing nutrients, so
they die of malnourishment, just like they make people malnourished.
(39:45):
I don't know if it's ironic or if they're like,
we're going to get these things back, you know. So,
like I was saying a minute ago, part of the
big problem uh with eradicating this is that it's not, um,
it's not a big news item. Like you know, a
lot like Ebola comes along, it grabs all the news,
and all of a sudden, you have a lot of funding. Um,
(40:06):
hookworm isn't you know. I don't want to say a
sexy disease because it's gross, but it's not. Uh, it's
kind of just off forgotten, and so they don't have
a lot of funding. I'm glad that Gates Is are
involved because that, you know, that makes it much more
high profile. But um, you know, it's still a big,
big issue, and uh hopefully you know, this will help
(40:28):
raise a little bit of awareness. Sure well, if if
hookworm is eradicated by twenty we'll have played a rather
large role in that. Uh. But now we have a
final twist. Yeah, there's this really great quote from the
sixties from a Rockefeller um parasitic worm specialist who said that, um,
(40:50):
we needed the eventual helmntic defaundation of man, saying getting
rid of worms from the human race entirely right. And
he said that for only in a society made up
of parasite free individuals. Well, we know of what the
human being is capable, basically saying like, we have no
idea how much we're being held back as a as
(41:13):
an entire race by worms, So we need to get
rid of them. But there's this growing body of research,
chuck that's showing that we actually need to be infected
by hookworms. It looks like, well, if it can potentially
treat a few types of disease. UM, I don't. I
(41:34):
wouldn't say that humans need it, but right now there's
some experimental research going on, and specific to hookworms, it
seems that it might help asthma. Okay, um, there are
other worms that they're using that could help with everything
from ultra to colitis, to Crohn's disease to multiple sclerosis.
(41:56):
But when it comes to the little hookworm, they think, um,
it might help asthma. Uh, they're not experimenting on humans yet.
The United States, I don't think. I think only in
the United Kingdom right now are they using in humans. Um.
But because it took worm, that side effects are basically
all the things we've been talking about. Um, you know,
(42:17):
every everything bad about the hookworm is going to happen
to Hugh. Right. The thinking behind it though, because that
makes zero sense, like why would that help is that
for some reason, worm parasitic worms prevent the human immune
system from going overboard somehow, right, and that the reason
why we have autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis or um
(42:42):
Crohn's disease are because of a lack of parasitic worms
in our bodies because we've eradicated them. So now these
other diseases that are autoimmune diseases have been able to rise.
So it kind of is a like you said, a
weird little twy. Yeah, we'll see. I mean right now,
they're mainly working in mice and rats, um. But like
(43:05):
anytime you're working with mice and rats, it's can't exactly
extrapolate that onto humans. So we shall see. It's only
one way to find out for you and I volunteer.
Well they you know I did see some experiments not
for this, but um, when they were doing hookworm experiments period,
they would infect people with hookworm and you know volunteers. Yeah,
(43:29):
and again, I mean like, it's not like a hookworm
is gonna kill you. And if you are not going
to get reinfected because you wear shoes and use like
a toilet with running water, Um, it's sure. Why not
you do it for science and money? Yes? Are you
got anything else? I do not what we want to
(43:50):
recommend the articles How a Worm Gave the South Bad
Name by Rachel Newer and war on Hookworms from Andy Borrowitz.
They're both well worth reading. Uh and Uh, since I
said they're well we're reading, it's time for listening to mail.
All right, I'm gonna call this uh follow up from
(44:11):
a very sweet couple I met at the airport. I
think I talked about them after our one I think
the Midwestern tour UM or no, no, no, it was
Louisiana New Orleans show. I met this very nice couple
who had been to the show. Um. They were I
think one of our more veteran and wise UM listeners
(44:37):
and show attendees. They were wonderful, uh, and they stopped
me in the airport. We talked for a little bit
and this is from them. Hey, Chuck, I wanted to
follow up. After the show in New Orleans, we talked
to you at the airport while we were waiting for
our flight back to Minneapolis. You were very gracious talking
to us when we had clearly interrupted you on your
way to do or get something, probably had a poop.
(45:01):
We told you our new hobby was going and following
you guys around the country. Uh, and making vacations that
out of your shows on tour, remember that. But we
haven't made it to a live show since. Um, we
haven't done a lot of shows since that. Uh, that's true. Well,
we've done a handful. We've both been slacking both parties. Yes,
(45:22):
but we're gonna hit the road for some shows later
this year, by the way, Uh, stay tuned for that.
So you and Josh did, however, inspire us in our
new venture. We started a podcast. Just before we left
to drive to Alaska in May. Joyce, who was the
lady in the couple, um, downloaded a bunch of podcasts
on how to make a podcast. By the time we
got back to Minnesota, we were well on our way
(45:45):
to starting Tall Tales and Travel, our podcast about adventures
in the outdoors. Uh, Lair and I don't know if
it's l A R R E. And I can't remember
if it was Lair or Larry. Layer's probably short for Larry,
maybe short for Lawrence, so it's doubly short. I'm gonna
call him Lair just l Uh. He has decades worth
(46:06):
of stories which have mostly taken place in Alaska. He's
been a bush pilot, charter boat captain, a police officer,
and general outdoorsman, to name a few adventure settings. Yeah,
that's a Layer. If I've ever heard on Lair, it
does most of the talking and Joyce does most of
the behind the scenes tasks. Uh. It's a division of
labor that we've mastered over the last thirty odd years. Together.
We have a website, Tall Tales and travel dot Com
(46:28):
where we post photos and videos from Lair's huge archive.
Now that we're up and running, we'll be putting more
work into sorting and sharing the collection more regularly. By
the way, we used square space. Thanks for the tip.
Nice anyway, guys were just writing into thank you for
the inspiration to let you know that we haven't given
up on seeing you live again. We're gonna keep our
ears open and here where Stuff you Should Know will
(46:50):
be up next, plan an adventure to see you there.
All the best that is Joyce Olsen and Lair Broward
and again check it out um Tall Tales and Travel
dot com or at Tall Tales and Travel dot Libson
l I B s y N dot com. And they
were just really sweet and nice and supportive. And the
(47:11):
notion that these people in their retirement would follow us
around the country just kind of knock my socks off. Yeah.
So I haven't listened to the show yet because this
just came in, but I'm gonna give it a whirl. Yeah,
thanks you guys in congratulations. It's pretty awesome. Um and uh,
I guess if we've inspired you, like Joyce and Layer
to do something neat, let us know about it. You
(47:32):
can tweet to us at s y s K podcast.
You can join us on Facebook dot com slash Stuff
you Should Know. You can send us an email The
Stuff podcasts at how stuff Works dot com and has
always joined us at our home on the web, Stuff
you Should Know dot com. For more on this and
thousands of other topics, is that how Stuff Works dot com.
Hey, March is tripod month, my friend, and you know
what that means. Yes, that means it's time to let
people know about your favorite podcasts, just to share the
sheer joy of podcast listening. That's right, it's t r
y pod still in nascent industry. A lot of people
don't know what podcasts are and helps everybody out if
(00:20):
you would go out and just say, hey, family member,
who I see it? Thanksgiving once a year? Right, you
should try out this thing called a podcast. Here's what
they are, here's a cool show you should try, and
here's how to get it. Yeah, and it doesn't have
to be our show, just any podcast you like in
general that you think someone else would like to share it. Yeah,
So get on board the dry pod train. Welcome to
(00:44):
stuff you should know from how stuff works dot com. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W.
Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry Rowland. She goes she just ran
away after nine years. I knew that would happen eventually. Yep.
(01:07):
She had a little bendel sack over her shoulder and
she's barefoot, which is dangerous. Jerry, that was a nice
little set up. Yeah, you might get uh, what do
you call it? The do itch? Yeah? Or well that's
the best one, the ground itch do, which is way
better than ground get a little discomfort in the webbing
(01:31):
between your toes, a little scratchy. Maybe a few days
later you're like, this is this athlete's foot. No, that
doesn't make you cough. Yeah, Plus you're no athlete. Don't
flatter yourself, that's what they would say. And then you
start coughing a little bit, and a few weeks after that,
you're just a big dope that can't lift an arm
(01:53):
to go stand up and do anything. You have hookworm? Yeah, uh,
well there you have it. Were you told as a child,
like you'll get worms? And you're gonna ask me that
because I grew up in the South, Well, no, I
mean I was told that too. I don't remember hearing
this stuff. I remember being scared about uh, scoliosis, and
(02:18):
I remember being scared about nuclear annihilation and so as
I um, and that's about it. Razors and apples at Halloween, yeah,
which is, as we've covered, not true. Any instance that
happened to that happened because of the urban legend. Not Uh. No,
(02:42):
I've never really heard of this, and what made you
think of this? By the way, I don't know you
like the parasites. I love parasites. They're interesting, especially this
particular parasite, because it turns out the hookworm might be
the most interesting of all of the parasitic war here
on planet Earth if you ask me, Well, agreed, because,
(03:04):
as you will see, the social context and the Southern
United States of what the hookworm meant over centuries never
knew about it. And it's pretty astounding. And as someone
who has long had to defend the South as not
just a backward place with a bunch of dumb yokels,
I'm just gonna from now on, I'm just gonna say, hookworm.
(03:25):
Look it up. Listen to our episode, and people right
now are going, what in the world, So let's well,
let's get into it. Let's remove their the fog of
curiosity and maybe irritation a little bit and start talking
about hookworms. Right, so we said you it starts with
your foot. Yeah, these are round worms. Yes, they're a
(03:47):
type of round worm, a nematode, right, yeah, Nematode phyl
um um. They're pretty young, about four million years old,
and uh, they have been described in this article you
sent most commonly as a as far as the way
they look as a tube within a tube like a
(04:07):
pair of socks. And then at one end, right at
one end, they have cutting plates also called fangs or teeth. Mouthparts, yeah, mouthparts,
and as Tracy Wilson would put it, and um, they
use those things for sucking blood. So that they want
is your blood because they get nutrients from your blood
(04:30):
and that makes them parasites. Yeah, and they as as
we sourced a few really great articles on this, but um,
as one of them points out to that a good
parasite or a good hookworm doesn't want to kill you because,
as it says in this article, that means the ride
is over right exactly. They want to keep you alive
(04:53):
and lazy so they can just keep reproducing and keep
sucking on your blood forever and ever and ever. And
in a very large part, hookworms have covald with humans,
and they've done so in a way that they get
the maximum benefit out of infecting a human um without
(05:15):
the pitfall of killing the human and ending the ride
for themselves. Right. So um, and they've had four hundred
million years to do it, and there's two kinds of hookworms. Mainly,
there's tons of hookworms, Like from what I understand, just
about every animal, every mammal has its own type of hookworm,
but they don't infect cross animal typically, And there's two
(05:37):
types of hookworms that infects humans specifically. There's the new
world hookworm naricatur Americana is very open minded, and then
there's the old word world hookworm uh and Solostoma duoden
all a right, and so both of them thrive in warmer,
(06:01):
tropical ish climates. And the an AMERICANUS in particular loves
sandy loami soil, and it just so happens that in
the American South has just the kind of climate to
host an American it's and it's around. Yeah, so here's
what happens. We were kind of kidding around about Jerry
(06:23):
walking around barefoot, but Jerry's old like me, and she
grew up in the South. We were all we all
come from sharecroppers and UH had outhouses. So here's what
would happen um all the way up until like which
is kind of distressing. Yeah, I thought so too. You
could walk around barefoot as uh Southern children were wanted
(06:46):
to do. Yeah, Apparently the chances of your of being
a kid with shoes, especially in the rural south, was
like next to nothing up until that, maybe the fifties
or sixties. Really yeah, uh so they would, like we
talked about the do uh the do it. You would
walk around barefoot. These little guys would get between your toes, uh,
(07:10):
root into your body through the feet, make their way
to the blood vessels and start the voyage to the lungs.
This is it's a fantastic voyage. Well for them, it is.
Um it's like inner space, yeah, um, up through the lungs,
finally through the circulatory system to the lungs where eventually,
like you said, you then you cough it up with
(07:33):
a dry cough, and then you swallow it into your
gut and the intestine and that's when it's like, this
is where I wanted to be all along. And the
nuts they go up through the foot circulatory system to
the lungs, make you cough, then you swallow them, and
then they finally get to the place where they're supposed
to be, the small intestine, and they latch on and
they start second blood. Yeah. And hookworms are interesting tape
(07:56):
worms or hermaphroditic. But hookworms like a lot of around worms. Uh,
they need to do it. Yeah, it's about to say
they like to who knows, maybe a little bit both,
depending on the mood. They have to in order to reproduce.
So what you do is they get into that intestine,
they find a lover, they take a lover. Excuse me,
(08:17):
Robert lamb in here, they take a lover, and then
they attach theirselves to the intestinal wall and say, I'm
here forever, I'm gonna I mean up to I've seen
up to thirty thousand eggs a day. Right, the female
will will lay thirty thousand fertilized eggs a day. Right,
And that's on the highest end. But you know, let's
(08:38):
say the low end is ten thousand, and say the
low end is a thousand. It's still a lot of eggs.
And that's just one female worm. Right. You can have
dozens hundreds of these things. They found that, Um, the
human can host up to about five hundred worms and survive.
You're not living a very fulfilling life, as we'll see,
(09:01):
but um, you you could have a number of these
worms all pumping out eggs, and the worm typically lives
between one and five years in the comforts of your gut,
and then um, you can also be reinfected. And here's
how right, So, when the females are spreading out a
thousand to thirty thousand eggs take your pick on a
(09:22):
daily basis, you're pooping those eggs out. And if you're
pooping and say like uh, like by the bushes or
in some sort of like outhouse, Yeah, it's eighteen seventy
five in West Virginia. You don't have indoor plumbing, right,
and let's say your outhouse isn't all that great, or
you're just again pooping in the bushes. You are probably
(09:44):
not wearing shoes. Those two things usually go hand in hand.
And so you're stepping in your old fecal material that's
still had eggs in it before those eggs have since
hatched into larva. Larva gone through the first two larval stages,
entered the third infective larval stage, and now it's crawling
up into your foot again and you're what's called worm
(10:06):
burden is expanded even further from one or two to
ten to twenty two up to hundreds. Yeah, and that's
if you just accidentally step in old pooh, whether it's
like spread around by animals walking around or by the rain. Um,
the chances of are exponentially more if you have a
good old fashioned poop slanging fight, sure do you You
(10:30):
know you don't want to get hit in the mouth
with that. God. Um. The other problem that um, well,
it was part of the problem was that, uh, that
was the second version of that even was that people
were using poop as fertilizer. Now it's one thing again
you can't really catch I'm sure you can catch some worms.
(10:50):
I know trick nosis is a problem for humans and
that's a pork worm. Um. But you you using say,
horse manure is real satively safe compared to using human
manure as fertilizer in your field. That's a relatively recent discovery.
People were using human manure as fertilizer for very a
(11:11):
very very long time. And it was called night soil
because at night the guys would come out and clean
your your privy out and walk them muck your poop,
your FeCO material down the street and collect more and
collect more, and then they would turn it into fertilizer.
Would say release the night soil before they dumped it
(11:32):
exactly and it would be fertilizer, and that'd be great
to make a crops grow, but it also just contaminate
your entire field with hookworms. And then little kids would
go out and work the field shoeless and they would
become infected from that too. So there were all these
really great opportunities for people to become infected by hookworms.
(11:54):
But there the hookworm habitat followed a certain a certain
line from about West Virginia down to I think East Texas. Uh.
And beneath that line that was the hookworm belt. Yeah,
they called it that, and above it they used human
manure for fertilizer too, but they didn't have hookworm. It
(12:16):
was in the South that the hookworm was a problem,
and it was a big problem, it turned out. Yeah,
it just occurred to me. We walked right past maybe
the best band name of all time in here, what
worm burden? Oh yeah, Wormburdon is pretty good. Um. All right,
well that's the the setup, uh, before we hit you
(12:36):
with a social context. So let's take a little break
here and we'll talk a little bit more about my
old kin folk right after this. All right, So before
(13:08):
we broke, we talked about what the hookworm is and
all the different, uh myriad ways which it could spread,
from accidentally walking in poop to poop slanging fights. Night
Soil Nights released the night soil rolling in it to
ultimate radically increase your worm burden. Um. So you found
(13:29):
this great article called how a Worm Gave the South
a Bad Name by a woman named Rachel Newer. Um.
It's on Nova. Yeah, it was really good. And she
is from the South and kind of wrote it from
that point of view. Um, and I get the feeling, like,
like me, she kind of his long head to defend
the American South as hey, we're not a bunch of dumb,
(13:50):
lazy yokels. Because that was you know, for a long time. Um,
and still continuing today to a certain degree. Yeah, that
notion kind of this that if you're from the South,
you're kind of slow, you may be a little dim witted,
you may be lazy. And this was you know, for
white folks, Black folks, Native Americans, just something about the
(14:11):
South made you lazy and dumb, especially among the lower
socioeconomic classes. And this wasn't just like off the cuff
um stereotyping. It was rooted in fact, in reality, there
was something different about people of a of the lower
socioeconomic classes in the South. Specifically, if you put them
(14:34):
side by side among the same socioeconomic classes of the North,
the ones in the North would be like, let's shovel
some cold baby, and the ones in the South would
be like, I'm just gonna lay here down next to
my wheelbarrow because I can't I can't get up. And
so Southerners were came to be seen as lazy, shiftless,
(14:54):
couldn't be trusted to do an honest day's work, and
they just thought it was part of the Southern character. Yeah,
and this wasn't just um a perception like they literally
lagged behind the North in terms of productivity, um economic development. Uh.
And we'll you know, we'll talk about some of these
statistics as we go. Well. Plus the Civil War didn't
(15:16):
help anything either. Well, now, that was obviously a big setback,
right So, and it would have been for any region
right at level of devastation and um um death. But
coupled with their already predisposition to this, that what what
came to be called the lazy germ uh it was,
(15:39):
it just set it back even further. Yeah, and at
one point in the American South up to fort Amazingly,
the population, like you said, from southeastern Texas to West
Virginia and all the way down, um was infected with hookworm. Yes,
that's a lot of people. I mean, it's obviously not
a majority, almost a majority. That would have would have
(16:03):
been a tomb Southerner. I mean, that's a lot of folks.
It is a lot of folks. And that was the
culprit behind this lazy shiftlessness among the poverty stricken Southern
poor and the rural. The poverty stricken, rural Southern poor
(16:23):
was apparently the majority of the South from the end
of the Civil War up until the I believe the
mid nineties or mid twentieth century. Um you were if
you were a Southerner, it was likely that you were
poor and did not live in the city until about
the forties. And there's a pretty clear demarcation line if
(16:43):
you did if you were wealthy in the South, or
you were lived in the city in the South in
the nineteenth and early twentieth century, you wore shoes, you
had bed pans um, and you could probably avoid this.
But if you didn't like those are It says in
this article that it was almost impossible to avoid if
(17:04):
you were poor and lived in the South, because you
also didn't have very good sanitation. No, you were just
it was just perfectly set up for you to keep
getting reinfected. Um. You know, every couple of years you
shed a dead hookworm, but in that time you probably
would have taken on several more. All right, so what
(17:26):
does this mean If you get hookworm, Like we said,
it's it's likely not going to directly kill you. Uh,
you might die from a common cold. Um, you might
die from malaria or typhoid fever, or you know, something
else may ultimately take you out because your body is
so weakened. But what it does in large part is
it causes an iron deficiency. Uh. If you're a pregnant
(17:48):
woman or a kid, iron deficiency is really bad. Um.
If you're a child, you need that iron for your
brain development. So you know, not only would you get
like physical sin terms like stomach bloat. Uh what what
was the uh the I thing like this the dull,
fishy stair fishy i'd stare. Yeah, just sort of like
(18:09):
they're basically described, these kids just sort of vacant, just
staring off into space. Um, so you know, some of
those are physical symptoms, but others were literally like a
lower i Q. Right, And so they believed that an
AMERICANUS came over as a result of the Atlantic slave trade,
that it was imported from Africa. So for centuries generations
(18:31):
of kids, um we're being born in the South who
had there, Um, they were physically and developmentally stunted. Yeah,
by hookworm infections. Yeah, it's sometimes girls wouldn't begin menstruation,
boys a lot of times would not even hit their
(18:52):
growth spurts. And not only where they had lower i
q s and learning uh you know, development disability ease,
but they were smaller and weaker. Yeah, and then you
combine this loss of blood. So so apparently about a
hundred worms in a in a normal adult will drink
about a teaspoon a day, which doesn't sound like that much,
(19:13):
but if you couple it that level of iron deficiency
with uh pre existing malnourishment due to poverty or the
lack of availability of like good food, Uh, then it
really becomes a huge problem. And it goes from like
this is a problem to this is this is a
catastrophic problem that can keep an entire region of a
(19:35):
country down projectivity productively. Yeah, and it uh like a
lot of disease we've talked about, whether it's like famine
or lack of clean water. It's it's cyclical in nature.
So it would occur where there was poverty, and then
it would keep people from working to work their way
out of poverty, and it just kind of compounded on
(19:56):
each other. Right, and then think about slavery as well. Right,
So not only have you been brought over to the
US as a slave, you're being forced to work against
your will in these horrific conditions. You're also being forced
to work and live in the same conditions that promotes hookworm.
So you're feeling lazy and shiftless. Ts for you you're
a slave. Add that to your toil and misery, you know,
(20:19):
like it just it just keeps getting worse. All right.
So I think we've made it clear, big problem in
the South, But again, no one had any idea why. Yeah,
it was just you know, the lazy South, and it's
you know, people have said that it literally set the
South back like decades and decades from the rest of
the country. No one knows what's going on. Until nineteen
(20:42):
o two, this dude came along and they should be
kind of a weird movie to market, but this would
be a good movie, I think. Oh, I think that's
the story of Charles Styles and Hookworm. It's a big
roller coaster ride, all right. So, uh, nineteen o two,
this guy named Charles Styles comes along. He's a zoologist
from from New York City, educated in Europe, no less.
(21:04):
So he played real well in the South, yeah, which,
as you'll see, it was a bit of part of
the problem. Uh. And the Department of Agriculture said, hey,
we need you to help these farmers down there keep
their animals healthy. So go down there and check things out.
And he was like he started to notice. He's like,
something's going on. These people are physically stunted. They're a
little off. Yeah, they're mentally stunted. And I don't think
(21:26):
they're just dumb and lazy. So he started apparently he
sounds like one of these guys that was just had
to get to the bottom of it something, you know,
Like he wouldn't just say, you know, oh, well everyone's
right about how it is down here. So he really
stuck to his instinct and realized that it was hookworm.
(21:48):
He literally was the guy who discovered that that was
the problem exactly. I think he um he did that
by analyzing stool samples. So he basically just hung around
men's rooms. He said, like, you're going to use that,
and they'd say, no, have at it. He just exactly,
and the people would just walk away. All right. It
(22:12):
went down. I don't know how it went down. I looked, Actually,
this guy is not the most celebrated person to ever
save an entire region from an infection. Um So, there's
not I didn't find a lot of background information on
him in particular. Um So, I have no idea how
it happened. I saw somewhere that said that he became
(22:33):
accidentally infected, and that's how he understood. Didn't see it
backed up anywhere else. I have no idea how this
man came to say, because again, you gotta you have
to be trading in fecal material here. So like this
guy had his hands on human poop at some point
(22:53):
or thought to look there. I'm not sure. Maybe he
was in a good old fashioned poops. It makes the
most sense that he he was. He's like, something's going
on to god, oh it's a worm. Uh. The point is,
though he was not well received. The local doctors didn't
want to hear it. They wouldn't listen. They dismissed him
as you know, this this carpet bag and yankee from Europe,
(23:18):
who you know, educated in Europe, who's down here telling us,
you know, he's he's an animal expert, and he's telling
us about our poop, making us lazy europe animal expert. Yeah,
they they really didn't listen to him much. So he
was like, fine, I'll just go to John de rock
Feller and tell him. I'm gonna tell on you. That's
basically what happened. Yeah, Rockefeller was this is at the
(23:40):
time when income inequality was about at the levels it
was now, and the wealthy industrialists of the age were
really really worried that they were going to have the
social order overthrown by angry people, so they invented philanthropy. Right. Yeah,
this is back when they worried about that kind of thing, right,
And Rockefeller said, well, we can't just we can't do
(24:01):
anything to actually support the problems that capitalism creates, because
then we'll just be drawing attention to the fact that
there are major problems with capitalist system. What else can
I support, and he heard about Styles, and Styles took
a meeting with Rockefeller and some of his his uh
higher up friends, and apparently at that meeting they closed
(24:24):
the deal, like we're funding this thing with the million
bucks right out of the gate, which is about twenty
six million today. And they set up the Rockefeller Sanitary
Commission for the Eradication of hookworm disease. That's right. But um,
despite the fact that they were trying to help Southerners, um,
(24:45):
not only with a medical issue, but to advance themselves
as a people. Um. Again, the Southerners A they didn't
want a light being shown on this problem because it's gross,
uh and it has a stigma. But they didn't want
um again. They didn't want these Yankees coming down there
and saying they can fix you, right, you know. And
(25:06):
Rockefeller said t s he said, I've got an oyster
dish named after me, maybe the best oyster dish besides raw.
I'm glad you said that. Uh. Should we take a break, Yeah,
all right, We're gonna come back and talk a little
bit about the road to eradication right after this. What
(25:50):
I mean, your body don't do what I mean, your
body don't do you and We're back and Chuck, we
had a not just a jingle that was a real
(26:13):
blues song. Yeah, people are like, man, somebody really made
an authentic old blue sounding jingle just for this episode. No,
that was the legendary Blind Blake with his song Hookworm Blues,
which was a real song about the hookworm blues. Right.
And I think blind Blake came up with that song
in ninety six, I believe. And the fact that he
(26:36):
is singing about hookworms um starting in the nineteen twenties
represents It just goes to show like how much progress
was made between the time the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission was
set up and Blind Blake had his number one hit,
his number one and in between that time for for
(27:00):
promoting this idea that there was such thing as hookworm
and that it was a real problem. Because when the
Rockefeller Sanitary Commission was set up in nineteen o nine,
the South was still and basically the grips of reconstruction.
It wasn't the reconstruction era anymore is the Jim Crow South,
but it was still really far behind as a result
(27:22):
of the war, and there were not a lot of
public services available. So one thing the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission
had going for it was money and then it was
going to be money invested in public health. All right,
So this is how they went about it. Uh it's
nineteen o nine. And like you said, they Rockefeller donated
a million bucks, which is how much today? It's pretty good. Um,
(27:48):
And they realized, well, I don't assume this was kind
of a purposeful move, um that they got a Southerner
on board to kind of lead the charge. Definitely. Um,
this person named Wickliffe Rose, great name. If there's a
hero of the story, it's him. If you asked me,
you think so not? What's his face? No? Styles? Yeah, alright,
(28:09):
I mean he did some great work. It was good,
But Whitecliffe Rose was the one who uh Whitecliffe. That's
how I've pronounced that he was the one who made
it happen, because because Styles could have discovered hookworm all
day long, but if he didn't have the personality to
to write cure people, then that doesn't really help. So
(28:30):
this would be Matthew McConaughey then in the movie. Yeah so,
and and the s would be Paul Giamatti. And this
is McConaughey coming in now. Uh So they get this
Southerner east from Nashville on board to run the organization.
And they had this approach where they would go to
(28:51):
a town that they would go to a town in
the South with these doctors. But before they did that,
they would start this UM campaign, like an awareness campaign
UM and schools to get and as I think we
talked about in other things, you get the kids on
board in schools, and they kind of helped get the
parents on board, and they started this campaign to tell
children about what's going on, and the kids would in
(29:13):
turn hopefully go home and tell their parents like, you know,
my pa, I ain't dumb, I got the hookworm. Look
my poop is wiggling away exactly, and um it was.
You know, they had a challenge in front of him because, um,
you know, you gotta poop in a bag or something
and give it to your teacher. Your teacher and entire schools,
(29:37):
these one room schoolhouses were infected. And this this one
kid they talked to later on said, uh, well he
was at the time. Well yeah, he was scared. Like
he said, he had constipation for a week. He didn't
want to like you didn't want to have hookworm. I
don't want my teacher to know me in this way. Yeah,
pretty much, sap um way. Never mind. But that was
(30:02):
but that was the whole setup, right yeah. I mean
like there was there was There was a public information
campaign that was part of it. There was community involvement.
That was a really big thing. That why Cliff Rose started.
He said, we can't do this without the support of
the local community. So they built networks with like doctors
and local health boards. They got the schools involved, um,
(30:24):
and it became a community thing, right. Yeah. So once
you had the public on board, they would set up
these clinics, um not permanent, these kind of temporary clinics,
and they would It was kind of a big deal
in the town. It said that they have a treat
it like an event, and people would bring picnics. I
don't know that's a wise thing to do at a
(30:45):
hookworm clinic, but they would bring picnics. And it says
in here that they some people even wanted to get
married in the hookworm tent, and I was like, that
seems weird and kind of like kitchy. But then I
also was like, I'll bet a lot of these people
have never seen the tent before, so they were like, yeah, yeah,
can we get married in the hookworm tent? And so, um,
(31:08):
there'd be this public information campaign leading up to the
day of the hookworm Day you can just call it.
And right, young a young doctor would ride into town
on horseback and he had a microscope and everything he
would Um, there was a couple of parts to it.
There was, um, the sanitation lecture, which was, here's how
(31:32):
you guys are getting cookworm. Here's how you build what's
called the sanitary privy. Yeah, like they couldn't give him
indoor plumbing, but they could at least teach them how
to have a nice enough out house, right. And there's
some very very simple principle. One is like don't don't
dig your latrine down until you hit groundwater, don't let
it go out into the stream, make sure animals can't
(31:54):
get into it, and like spread it around, make sure
your feet aren't standing in the same pit that you're
pooping in. It's really basic stuff, but like that was
a big part of it, right, Um. And then also
explaining how the infection process worked. Right, So because they
understood very early on, um that yes, you can get
(32:15):
rid of hook worms fairly easily, but you can also
get reinfected fairly easy, so they had to get that
part across as well. Yeah, and like again, you can't
buy everyone's shoes, but you can say, maybe don't play
near the outhouse. You gotta stop the poop slinging fights
all together. Yeah, they just have to be gone the
thing in the past. That's the number one thing. They're
(32:35):
part of the salad days. And then this the sample
analysis would begin, and the poor doctor would just look
with his microscope at each poop sample and say past fail,
pass fail. Well, and if the bag was vibrating, they
didn't even have to look. Yeah, like that that cheese
in Sardinia, I think that with the maggots, the maggot cheese.
(32:59):
Didn't we talk about a maggot episode, Sure we did.
We're both so Um. If you were found to be
infected with worms, you would get very simple, um pharmaceutical treatment,
really simple. There's this extraordinarily toxic stuff called thyme all yeah,
(33:22):
t H y m L Yeah. And it would kill
your worms. Yeah, and it could also kill you if
you took it with the wrong combination of foods or
and or alcoholic beverages. You wanted to avoid alcohol and
fats and oils on the day you took it, and
then you would follow your dose of thyme all with
epsom salt, which would remove the thyme all from your body. Yeah,
(33:45):
and uh, they said at some point, you know what,
that stuff is super toxic, so why don't we replace
that with something called carbon tectric chloride um That must
be much better. Now. It was also very lethal, I
guess it. You know, at the time didn't have anything
that wasn't also dangerous to take, right, and that did
(34:07):
the trick And the fact that the epsom salt would
get rid of it, I think helped quite a bit. Yeah.
So the great end of this story would be if
the Rockefeller's money was well spent and five to ten
years later they eradicated hookworm in the South. But that
didn't happen. Um. It was successful in a lot of ways.
Awareness kind of be in the chief way, but as
(34:30):
we said a few times, um reinfection is kind of
the biggest problem. Like you, they might have gotten rid
of a lot of hookworm, only you know, to have
these kids who couldn't help but have their poops slanging fights, uh,
and then get hookworm all over again exactly and so.
But if you go and read the Rockefeller's um the
Rockefeller Foundations um rundown of that program, they basically say
(34:55):
it was this one guy who lobbied hard to like
just move on. Whatever it was somebody from the Rockfeller
found that said we're done with this. We've done our
work right. And they had, like you said, in a
certain way, they had set up some of the earliest
public health networks in the South. They had convinced the
South that there was such thing as hookworm and that
(35:15):
it was a big problem and that if they were
able to get rid of it, they could um catch
up to the rest of the country. And they said,
now the local doctors, now the local health clinics can
take over from here. But again, yeah, it wasn't until
the forties that that hookworm really started to be eradicated,
and it had very little to do with the pharmaceutical treatments.
(35:37):
It was the fact that indoor plumbing became prevalent, or
I mean it was literally like better food, better plumbing,
more shoes, the end of share cropping, which was a
type of um agricultural system that kept people poor and
kept people in the fields. So it was it kept
the same unsanitary conditions for hookworm infection right there. Yeah,
(36:00):
what did you call it when they would dump the
poop night night soil? Yeah, no more night soil dumping. Uh,
mechanization started and it was kind of a combination of
all these Just the modernization of the American South is
really what ended it. Um. And you know, the proof
is kind of in the pudding in that today in
(36:20):
conditions similar to the American South a hundred years ago
plus in other parts of the world, it's still a
really big problem. It is a really problem, apparently something
like I saw up to um. In this article The
War on Hookworms by Andy Borrowitz, he says that up
to something like seven hundred and forty million people around
(36:43):
the world are thought to have hookworm infections, right yeah,
about forty to fifty million, of which are pregnant women,
which is you know, obviously one of the uh, one
of the worst. Like we said, kids and pregnant women
is one of the worst kind of people to get
to end the status, right and uh, mainly because it
increases your chances of dying during childbirth because of anemia. Right. Um,
(37:08):
So it is a huge problem around the world. There's there.
There's this kind of moniker for um hookworm infection along
with certain other infections. They're lumped together under the umbrella
of neglected tropical diseases. And the reason they're called that
is because this is stuff that, like you can easily
get rid of if you alleviate poverty in the the
(37:33):
developing world. But we're not doing that, and it's out
a neglect basically. Yeah, it's not. It's not the kind
of thing where you can just invent the vaccine and
it's gone again because of the reinfection, because these people
are still poor and still in those conditions. Um, we're talking.
It's some of the highest rates are Sierra Leone, Democratic
(37:54):
Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Ethiopia, India, Venezuela, Indonesia. UM also interestingly, UM,
China in Brazil, which kind of surprised me. Yeah, well
it's the same thing is like the South back in
the day, where you have very very um or well
off urban areas and very very very poor rural areas.
(38:15):
The same thing in parts of China and Brazil today. Yeah.
And I think another reason, Um, at least this article
you sent kind of makes the argument that it's uh
still a problem. In fact, since nine it's declined globally
by just five Yes, despite the fact that something like
four hundred and fifty million people have been treated for hookworm,
(38:38):
but that declines, it's only gone down five percent. And
all what that's saying is as long as there's the
unsanitary conditions, there's going to be hookworm, right, so we
have to alleviate the unsanitary conditions, and you do that
by alleviating poverty. And there's a group of of foundations
like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, World Health Organization,
(38:59):
they've gotten together to create this End seven program, and
that's they're trying to end seven of the neglected tropical
diseases by and hookworm is one of them. And there's treatments.
There's it's really easy to get rid of hookworm. There's
actually a couple of ironic treatments for hookworm. One medication
for getting rid of hookworm UM prevents the hookworms from
(39:24):
creating a t P, which is like an energy source,
so they become lethargic and die just like they make
you lethargic. The other medication, UM attaches the to the
hookworms intestines and prevents the hookworm from absorbing nutrients, so
they die of malnourishment, just like they make people malnourished.
(39:45):
I don't know if it's ironic or if they're like,
we're going to get these things back, you know. So,
like I was saying a minute ago, part of the
big problem uh with eradicating this is that it's not, um,
it's not a big news item. Like you know, a
lot like Ebola comes along, it grabs all the news,
and all of a sudden, you have a lot of funding. Um,
(40:06):
hookworm isn't you know. I don't want to say a
sexy disease because it's gross, but it's not. Uh, it's
kind of just off forgotten, and so they don't have
a lot of funding. I'm glad that Gates Is are
involved because that, you know, that makes it much more
high profile. But um, you know, it's still a big,
big issue, and uh hopefully you know, this will help
(40:28):
raise a little bit of awareness. Sure well, if if
hookworm is eradicated by twenty we'll have played a rather
large role in that. Uh. But now we have a
final twist. Yeah, there's this really great quote from the
sixties from a Rockefeller um parasitic worm specialist who said that, um,
(40:50):
we needed the eventual helmntic defaundation of man, saying getting
rid of worms from the human race entirely right. And
he said that for only in a society made up
of parasite free individuals. Well, we know of what the
human being is capable, basically saying like, we have no
idea how much we're being held back as a as
(41:13):
an entire race by worms, So we need to get
rid of them. But there's this growing body of research,
chuck that's showing that we actually need to be infected
by hookworms. It looks like, well, if it can potentially
treat a few types of disease. UM, I don't. I
(41:34):
wouldn't say that humans need it, but right now there's
some experimental research going on, and specific to hookworms, it
seems that it might help asthma. Okay, um, there are
other worms that they're using that could help with everything
from ultra to colitis, to Crohn's disease to multiple sclerosis.
(41:56):
But when it comes to the little hookworm, they think, um,
it might help asthma. Uh, they're not experimenting on humans yet.
The United States, I don't think. I think only in
the United Kingdom right now are they using in humans. Um.
But because it took worm, that side effects are basically
all the things we've been talking about. Um, you know,
(42:17):
every everything bad about the hookworm is going to happen
to Hugh. Right. The thinking behind it though, because that
makes zero sense, like why would that help is that
for some reason, worm parasitic worms prevent the human immune
system from going overboard somehow, right, and that the reason
why we have autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis or um
(42:42):
Crohn's disease are because of a lack of parasitic worms
in our bodies because we've eradicated them. So now these
other diseases that are autoimmune diseases have been able to rise.
So it kind of is a like you said, a
weird little twy. Yeah, we'll see. I mean right now,
they're mainly working in mice and rats, um. But like
(43:05):
anytime you're working with mice and rats, it's can't exactly
extrapolate that onto humans. So we shall see. It's only
one way to find out for you and I volunteer.
Well they you know I did see some experiments not
for this, but um, when they were doing hookworm experiments period,
they would infect people with hookworm and you know volunteers. Yeah,
(43:29):
and again, I mean like, it's not like a hookworm
is gonna kill you. And if you are not going
to get reinfected because you wear shoes and use like
a toilet with running water, Um, it's sure. Why not
you do it for science and money? Yes? Are you
got anything else? I do not what we want to
(43:50):
recommend the articles How a Worm Gave the South Bad
Name by Rachel Newer and war on Hookworms from Andy Borrowitz.
They're both well worth reading. Uh and Uh, since I
said they're well we're reading, it's time for listening to mail.
All right, I'm gonna call this uh follow up from
(44:11):
a very sweet couple I met at the airport. I
think I talked about them after our one I think
the Midwestern tour UM or no, no, no, it was
Louisiana New Orleans show. I met this very nice couple
who had been to the show. Um. They were I
think one of our more veteran and wise UM listeners
(44:37):
and show attendees. They were wonderful, uh, and they stopped
me in the airport. We talked for a little bit
and this is from them. Hey, Chuck, I wanted to
follow up. After the show in New Orleans, we talked
to you at the airport while we were waiting for
our flight back to Minneapolis. You were very gracious talking
to us when we had clearly interrupted you on your
way to do or get something, probably had a poop.
(45:01):
We told you our new hobby was going and following
you guys around the country. Uh, and making vacations that
out of your shows on tour, remember that. But we
haven't made it to a live show since. Um, we
haven't done a lot of shows since that. Uh, that's true. Well,
we've done a handful. We've both been slacking both parties. Yes,
(45:22):
but we're gonna hit the road for some shows later
this year, by the way, Uh, stay tuned for that.
So you and Josh did, however, inspire us in our
new venture. We started a podcast. Just before we left
to drive to Alaska in May. Joyce, who was the
lady in the couple, um, downloaded a bunch of podcasts
on how to make a podcast. By the time we
got back to Minnesota, we were well on our way
(45:45):
to starting Tall Tales and Travel, our podcast about adventures
in the outdoors. Uh, Lair and I don't know if
it's l A R R E. And I can't remember
if it was Lair or Larry. Layer's probably short for Larry,
maybe short for Lawrence, so it's doubly short. I'm gonna
call him Lair just l Uh. He has decades worth
(46:06):
of stories which have mostly taken place in Alaska. He's
been a bush pilot, charter boat captain, a police officer,
and general outdoorsman, to name a few adventure settings. Yeah,
that's a Layer. If I've ever heard on Lair, it
does most of the talking and Joyce does most of
the behind the scenes tasks. Uh. It's a division of
labor that we've mastered over the last thirty odd years. Together.
We have a website, Tall Tales and travel dot Com
(46:28):
where we post photos and videos from Lair's huge archive.
Now that we're up and running, we'll be putting more
work into sorting and sharing the collection more regularly. By
the way, we used square space. Thanks for the tip.
Nice anyway, guys were just writing into thank you for
the inspiration to let you know that we haven't given
up on seeing you live again. We're gonna keep our
ears open and here where Stuff you Should Know will
(46:50):
be up next, plan an adventure to see you there.
All the best that is Joyce Olsen and Lair Broward
and again check it out um Tall Tales and Travel
dot com or at Tall Tales and Travel dot Libson
l I B s y N dot com. And they
were just really sweet and nice and supportive. And the
(47:11):
notion that these people in their retirement would follow us
around the country just kind of knock my socks off. Yeah.
So I haven't listened to the show yet because this
just came in, but I'm gonna give it a whirl. Yeah,
thanks you guys in congratulations. It's pretty awesome. Um and uh,
I guess if we've inspired you, like Joyce and Layer
to do something neat, let us know about it. You
(47:32):
can tweet to us at s y s K podcast.
You can join us on Facebook dot com slash Stuff
you Should Know. You can send us an email The
Stuff podcasts at how stuff Works dot com and has
always joined us at our home on the web, Stuff
you Should Know dot com. For more on this and
thousands of other topics, is that how Stuff Works dot com.
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