If you’re a parent, you’re probably familiar with threadworms. If you’re not a parent, then you may not have heard of them at all. They’re one of those secret joys of parenthood that no one mentions until they turn up — grim, pale little creatures, wriggling in a child’s poo — whereupon you learn that almost every other family has gone through the same thing. Your parents may well have gone through it, with you, and then just … never spoken of it again, because eeerrgh. I almost feel like I’m breaking some parenting omertà just by mentioning them. But I need to, because threadworms can help you understand why we need to worry about artificial intelligence.
They’re unsettling, disgusting things, threadworms: or they were to me, when I first came across them. But – luckily – they’re easily treated. A cheap, over-the-counter medicine, mebendazole, kills the lot. You have to dose the whole family, clean your linen, and dose again two weeks later, because the eggs (god, I’m shuddering just typing this) survive for a couple of weeks; but basically there is a simple, nuke-them-all-from-orbit cure.
Threadworms are just one species of intestinal worms, also known as helminths; there are hookworms, pinworms, tapeworms, whipworms, others. And they’re common — not just in north London, but around the world. The US Centres for Disease Control estimate that Ascaris lumbricoides is present in the intestinal tracts of about 1 billion people around the world. Usually, the infection has no symptoms, but in children it can lead to malnutrition, slow growth and impaired learning.
Luckily, again, these helminths can be killed with the same drug, mebendazole, or a related one, albendazole. Just as with the threadworms that cause itchy bottoms in the rich west, the Ascaris that cause childhood stunting in the developing world can be nuked, effectively and cheaply. A course of albendazole costs a few cents.
Dosing someone who’s been diagnosed with helminths, then, is a no-brainer. It’s cheap and easy and effective. But over the past 20 years or so, there’s been a row going on about doing more than that: about giving the drugs to entire schools’ worth of children, regardless of whether they’ve been diagnosed with worms or not.
In the late 1990s, two economists, Edward Miguel of Berkeley and Michael Kremer of Harvard, ran a study. They took 75 schools in Kenya, and gave albendazole to all the kids in 50 of them. Their results were impressive: absenteeism dropped by a quarter; children did better at school. The benefits also seemed to spread to nearby schools which hadn’t been treated, presumably by disrupting the spread of worms in the region. The whole thing cost $3.50 per pupil.
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