Welcome to the Growth Blog

The Growth Blog is a forum for you - the policy maker, the academic, the student, and the interested citizen of the world - to agree, disagree, or simply to engage current practitioners on policies and issues critical to development. This platform was inspired by the series of meetings that the Commission on Growth and Development held around the world over the course of the last two years. Of the many lessons that emerged in the deliberations, the one that stands out is that inclusive growth requires inclusive thinking, and inclusive discussion.

 

deworming

Parasites and Poverty in the Tropics: Some Historical Perspective

Submitted by Hoyt Bleakley on Sat, 06/20/2009 - 21:08.

Picture a place where children are so infested with parasites that they are listless and weak. Even when they are feeling well enough to go to school, they are so anemic that learning is difficult. While this could be a scene in many of today's poor, tropical countries, it was also typical in the southern United States less than a century ago. In 1910 about 40 percent of Southern children suffered from infection by hookworm, a tiny bloodsucking worm that invaded their intestines. Malaria also infected a large fraction of Southerners back then.

 

In fact, hookworm and malaria were so prevalent in the South that historians blame them for giving rise to the widespread stereotype of the “lazy Southerner.” Yet they were so successfully and thoroughly vanquished, that the notion of hookworm and malaria in the southern United States sounds improbable today.

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