The human race is riddled with worms. They coil and squirm and chew through most of the world’s population. When the average man dies, a host of worms dies with him. But wormkind goes wriggling on, to infest his children, reduce their vitality, cause disfiguring sores or swellings, and lower their resistance.
There is no medical excuse for most of the worms, said Dr. Norman R. Stoll of the Rockefeller Institute, speaking before an A.A.A.S. meeting in Boston (see SCIENCE). Some parasitic worms are transmitted by insects or other carriers. Seven-eighths of the infestations are due simply to man’s “ineffective insulation from his own excretory products.”
Dr. Stoll’s paper, This Wormy World, was a loud demand that something be done. He feels that worms are shamefully neglected. They lack drama, cause no great pandemics. But they are persistent, ubiquitous and “unremittingly corrosive.” There are less than 2,200 million people in the world, Dr. Stoll estimates, and more than 2,200 million worm infestations. (Some people have an assortment.)
Worms are multiplying about as fast as the population. By the year 2000 there may be 3,300 million people in the world. But Dr. Stoll is sure that worms will multiply too, and make the most of their opportunities.
Right around Home. The U.S. has its store of worms. In the highbrow town of Princeton, NJ. (where Dr. Stoll lives), 23% of the children were found, in 1943, to be infested with some kind of worms. Commonest U.S. worm is the trichinella, which makes the U.S. its headquarters and infests 21 million people, one-sixth of the population, three times as many as in all the rest of the world. These worms cause trichinosis, with a long list of symptoms: spots on the skin, swellings, nausea, pains all over the body, wasting and general weakness.
Trichinellae are usually transmitted to humans by infested pork, where they lie in wait coiled up in little cysts. When such pork is eaten (by a man or a hog) without thorough cooking, the cysts dissolve; the liberated worms mate and multiply in the intestines. The young worms wriggle into the lymphatic ducts, migrate to the muscles, and enclose themselves in cysts. One meal of improperly cooked infested pork is enough to start trichinosis.
Says Dr. Stoll: “When we Americans manifest an unbecoming impatience at how slothful other peoples are in undertaking . . . steps to free themselves from [worm infection], let us ruminate on the extraordinary slowness demonstrated by a supposedly widely educated people to protect itself against trichinosis … by the simple device of eating pork only when the trichinae in it have been cooked, say, to the consistency of medium-boiled eggs.”
Hogs get their trichinellae almost entirely from uncooked garbage containing infested meat scraps. “We maintain in the Jersey Meadows near Secaucus,” says Dr. Stoll, “a malodorous demonstration of how it is done.” Prohibiting this practice would break the chain of transmission, eliminate “garbage worms,” and trichinosis.
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