Question: is it easy to get rid of worms?

Anouk Gouvras answered on 14 Jun 2012:

Oh yes, most parasitic worm infections can be treated with a class of drugs called anthelmintics. (the word comes from ”helminth” which is a parasitic worm, and “anti” which in this case means against). There are a variety of chemicals that act as anthelmintics, some are man made (such as the one we use for schistosome worms, called Praziquantel) and some occur naturally in plants such as Artemisin which is found in annual wormwood, a common plant. Artemisin can act as an anthelmintic but it is more famous for being the current chemical that can treat another (non-worm) parasitic disease, malaria.

Some anthelmintics are very expensive, luckily the one we need for schistosomes (that infect over 200 million people in the world, causing the disease Schistosomiasis) is very, very cheap to make. Most control programs get donations of Praziquantel from pharmaceutical companies like Merck. This is so important for us because parasitic worms such as schistosomes infect the poorest people of the world and they simply can not afford this very cheap drug. That is why schistosome control programs are normally funded by charity organisations such as SCI – the Schistosome Control Initiative, which helps public health programs in sub-Saharan countries to get the drug from pharmaceutical companies and then distribute it to the villages that are affected.

See although it is easy to get rid of worms from one person (just by giving them a dose of Praziquantel) they then get infected again because the parasite is in the water, in the lakes and rivers. So you need to treat regularly in order to keep the person free of the parasite. If you want to get rid of the parasite from an area, a district or a country then that require a lot of commitment and effort because you have to treat almost everybody every year, maybe even twice a year.

In Zanzibar we are trying to eliminate Schistosomiasis and the natural History Museum, the Schistososome Control Initiative and a big group of people working in SCORE (very long name – Schistosomiasis Consortium for operational research and evaluation) are working together to help the Zanzibar Ministry of Health to treat everybody in Zanzibar twice a year so that in 5 years time there will be no more schistosomes in Zanzibar. We need a lot of free drugs for that!