“H “is for Hookworm

“H “is for Hookworm. Long before hookworm was identified as a parasitic disease, its mostly White victims were a common presence in the South. Pale and listless, with vacant stairs and winged shoulder blades, these lazy southerners were a staple of northern literature. In the early 1900s the shiftless Southerners thesis was debunked as their traits had a biological basis: infestation by a worm, Necator americanus, which was native to Africa and had migrated west with enslaved persons. Nurtured in the South’s damp and sandy soil, it caused severe anemia, stunted growth and often mental retardation in its victims. In 1909 the Rockefeller sanitary Commission for Elimination of Hookworm Disease offered treatment to tens of thousands of southerners and by 1914 infection rates fell sharply (notably in South Carolina) and by the 1940s the disease was basically eliminated.