What could possibly be interesting about it? Get this, hookworms could be the cure for Asthma, allergies and any kind of auto-immune disease ( MS, Type 1 Diabetes etc).
Since I grew up in semi rural India, I happened to be a host for this worm as well, read not anymore. The general theory is that, proper sanitation techniques caused this worm to be eliminated from the guts of millions of people. Guess what, once this worm, which co-habitated human being guts for millions of years, got eliminated, we have the intro to all these auto immune diseases.
The science of this is that, human immunity has been strong for a long time now, and the body attacks any foreign/local item viciously if it considers it be dangerous. Apparently the body thinks oak, dust and in some cases our own nervous system to be dangerous(MS). The result of this thinking (of the body) is typically an allergy attack, which most of us deal with in one form or the other. Enter Hookworms: as with any other foreign body lodged in our bodies, our immune system correctly identifies this "parasite" as an alien intruder and tries to attack it. But, the hookworm, apparently has a work around, it releases a hormone, leading the attacking agents of our body into believing that, that hookworm is not so dangerous. The released hormone seems to be the key here.
For people who are infected with hookworms, they have this hormone being produced in the body constantly by their friends in the gut, which helps the immune system to chill off and less allergies. There have been studies saying hookworm infected folks are 50% less likely to get an allergy attack. And I definitely did not come across any body in our village, who had asthma.
It all started around a lunch conversation at work which led to this podcast on Radio Lab. The interesting part is between 30 and 45 mins into the podcast.
This got me thinking, should I get my daughter, who BTW has serious asthma. But, I am not brave enough at this point, I would wait for some more research to be done.
