[3rd World News]U.N. Looks At Extreme Poverty In The U.S.

Places with extreme poverty in the US seem to be an interesting question to pose to small government libertarians who want to cut all kinds of services, starve the beast, all while giving tax cuts skewed towards Republican donors and perhaps voters.

Though it's undoubtedly a failure in the current system for this to happen, bigger and richer states are subsidizing states like Alabama to presumably at least reduce these infrastructural gaps. Would a corporation or billionaire baron deign to "free market" the problem of eliminating hookworm in these areas?

btw, the affected people are eating/drinking ****.

The U.N. Looks At Extreme Poverty In The U.S., From Alabama To California

"This seems safe to [the residents]," says Dr. Rojelio Mejia, a pediatrician and infectious disease specialist at the Baylor College of Medicine who led the hookworm study. "But Alabama is very hilly and any drizzle of rain causes flooding, so whatever they delivered to the site spreads to the entire area, including their neighbors' area."

The soil in the area, Mejia adds, also drains poorly, worsening the situation.

When the trenches overflow, the soil becomes contaminated with waste. Anyone walking outside barefoot, or even with bare ankles, risks hookworm infection — that's because the worms are expert at latching on to passers-by.

What's worse, even homes can become contaminated. Nearly three quarters of study participants reported that at one point or another, raw sewage had made its way back into their house. Flooding often carries sewage to their doorways, Mejia says, and drainage pipes can become overwhelmed with rain, flushing waste back into the home.

Concerned about the sanitation situation and its potential health implications, the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise — a nonprofit organization that helps address poverty in the state — approached Mejia's team. Mejia's colleagues had previously reported that poor U.S. communities with poor sanitation were at risk for "neglected tropical diseases, which we ordinarily think of as confined to developing countries."

Mejia's team tested for multiple parasites prevalent in the tropics, including hookworm. Stool samples revealed that community members had one or two hookworm eggs per gram of stool.


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That differs from what researchers see in other countries where hookworm is a problem.

"In poorer [areas of] Argentina, I have seen people with 1,000, 5,000 or even 20,000 eggs per gram of stool," Mejia says,

The reason is likely that there are more hookworms infesting the soil in poorer countries, perhaps because of high rates of open defecation.

"Hookworm does not replicate inside of you; they don't mate inside of you and have baby worms," Diemert explains. "The only way to increase the number of worms in your gut is to be exposed to more larvae outside."

Diemert hypothesizes that residents of the Alabama community are only periodically exposed to worms.

Treatment is easy. One dose of albendazole — two 200mg pills — can clear the worms out. But the cost of the drug in the U.S. can be a problem.

And as we've learned in other countries, treatment is only a temporary fix.

"We can't prevent people from getting re-infected until they deal with their sewage problem," Diemert says. "You can give as much education as you want, but if they still have flooding and no resources for proper plumbing, you can't do much to stop it from happening again."

Fixing the problem is next to impossible for much of the community, according to the research team. The average income in Lowndes County is $18,036 and a septic system for a single home would cost about $15,000.

"In my study, we have a very poor, disenfranchised population here that is being neglected," Mejia says. "Everybody was African American and living below the poverty line."

Study participants were alerted if they had hookworm and encouraged to follow-up with their primary care physicians for treatment.