Stuff You Should Know - Southerners Aren’t Lazy and Dumb, They Just Had Hookworm

Episode Date: March 16, 2017

There was a time when the lower classes of the American South were considered lazy and dimwitted, a stereotype that still somewhat survives today. But this stereotype was rooted in fact. Hookworms, it turns out, were sapping Southerners’ life force. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, March is tripod month, my friend, and you know what that means. Yes, that means it's time to let people know about your favorite podcasts, just to share the sheer joy of podcast listening.

That's right, it's T-R-Y Pod, still a nascent industry. A lot of people don't know what podcasts are, and it helps everybody out if you would go out and just say, hey, family member who I see at Thanksgiving once a year, you should try out this thing called a podcast. Here's what they are, here's a cool show you should try, and here's how to get it.

Yeah, and it doesn't have to be our show, just any podcast you like in general that you think someone else would like, just share it. Yeah, yeah. So get on board the tripod train. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Here we go.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry Rowland, this is Stuff You Should Know. There she goes. She just ran away after nine years. I knew that would happen eventually. Yep, she had her little spindle sack over her shoulder. And she's barefoot, which is dangerous, Jerry.

That was a nice little setup. Yeah. You might get, what do you call it, the do itch. Yeah, or, well, that's the best one. The ground itch. Do itch is way better than ground itch. Sure. Get a little discomfort in the webbing between your toes.

A little scratchy, maybe a few days later, you're like. Or is this athlete's foot? No, that doesn't make you cough. Yeah, plus you're no athlete, don't flatter yourself. That's what they would say. And then you start coughing a little bit, and a few weeks after that, you're just a big dope that can't lift an arm.

Do you go stand up and do anything? You have hookworm. Yeah. Yeah, well, there you have it. Were you told as a child, like, you'll get worms? I knew you were gonna ask me that, because I grew up in the south. Well, no, I mean, I was told that too.

I don't remember hearing this. Really? I remember being scared about scoliosis, and I remember being scared about nuclear annihilation. And so was I. And that's about it. That's good. Razors and apples at Halloween.

Yeah, which is, as we've covered, not true. Any instance that happened of that happened because of the urban legend, not giving rise to it. Yeah. No, I never really heard of this. And what made you think of this, by the way? I don't know. You like the parasites.

I love parasites. They're interesting, especially this particular parasite, because it turns out the hookworm might be the most interesting of all of the parasitic worms here on planet Earth, if you ask me. Well, agreed, because as you will see, the social context in the southern United States of what the hookworm meant over centuries

never knew about it, and it's pretty astounding. And as someone who has long had to defend the south as not just a backward place with a bunch of dumb yokels, I'm just going to, from now on, I'm just going to say, hookworm, look it up. Listen to our episode. And people right now are going, what in the world? So let's, well, let's get into it.

Let's remove the fog of curiosity and maybe irritation a little bit and start talking about hookworms, right? So we said it starts with your foot. Yeah, these are roundworms. Yes, they're a type of roundworm, a nematode, right? Yeah, a nematode phylum. They're pretty young, about 400 million years old, and they have been described in this article you sent

most commonly, as far as the way they look, as a tube within a tube. Yeah. Like a pair of socks. And then at one end, right, at one end, they have cutting plates, also called fangs or teeth. Yeah, mouth parts. Yeah, mouth parts.

And as Tracy Wilson would put it. Yes. And they use those things for sucking blood. That's what they want is your blood because they get nutrients from your blood and that makes them parasites. Yeah, and they, as we sourced a few really great articles on this,

but as one of them points out too, that a good parasite or a good hookworm doesn't wanna kill you, because as it says in this article, that means the ride is over. You're right, exactly. They wanna keep you alive and lazy so they can just keep reproducing

and keep sucking on your blood forever and ever and ever. Right. And in a very large part, hookworms have co-evolved with humans and they've done so in a way that they get the maximum benefit out of infecting a human without the pitfall of killing the human and ending the ride for themselves, right? Yeah.

So, and they've had 400 million years to do it and there's two kinds of hookworms mainly. There's tons of hookworms. Like from what I understand, just about every animal or every mammal has its own type of hookworm. Right. Infect cross animal, typically. And there's two types of hookworms

that infect humans specifically. There's the new world hookworm, Nercator Americanus. Very open-minded. And then there's the old world hookworm, Anselostoma Duodinale. A little less open-minded. Right. And so, both of them thrive in warmer tropical-ish climates.

Yeah. And the Anamericanus in particular loves sandy loamy soil. And it just so happens that in the American South, it has just the kind of climate to host Anamericanus and it's around. Yeah, so here's what happens. We were kind of kidding around about Jerry walking around barefoot,

but Jerry's old like me and she grew up in the South. We all come from sharecroppers. Sure. And had outhouses. So here's what would happen all the way up until 1985, which is kind of distressing. Yeah, I thought so too. You could walk around barefoot

as Southern children were wanting to do. Yeah, apparently the chances of being a kid with shoes, especially in the rural South, was next to nothing. Up until maybe the 50s or 60s. Really? Yeah. So they would, like we talked about the do itch, you would walk around barefoot,

these little guys would get between your toes, root into your body through the feet, make their way to the blood vessels and start the voyage to the lungs. This is, it's a fantastic voyage. Well, for them it is. Yeah. It's like interspace.

Yeah. Up through the lungs, finally, through the circulatory system to the lungs, where eventually, like you said, then you cough it up with a dry cough and then you swallow it into your gut and the intestine and that's when it's like, this is where I wanted to be all along. Isn't that nuts?

They go up through the foot, circulatory system to the lungs, make you cough, then you swallow them and then they finally get to the place where they're supposed to be, the small intestine. And they latch on and they start sucking blood. Yeah, and hookworms are interesting. Tapeworms are hermaphroditic, but hookworms, like a lot of aroundworms.

They need to do it. Yeah, I was about to say they like to, who knows. Maybe a little bit of both, depending on the mood. They have to in order to reproduce. So what you do is, they get into that intestine, they find a lover, they take a lover, excuse me. This is Robert Lamb in here. They take a lover and then they attach

themselves to the intestinal wall and say, I'm here forever. I'm gonna, I mean, I've seen up to 30,000 eggs a day. Right, the female will lay 30,000 fertilized eggs a day. And that's on the highest end, but you know, let's say the low end is 10,000. Right, and say the low end is 1,000. It's still a lot of eggs.

And that's just one female worm, right? You can have dozens, hundreds of these things. They found that a human can host up to about 500 worms and survive. You're not living a very fulfilling life, as we'll see. But you can have a number of these worms, all pumping out eggs. And a worm typically lives between one and five years

in the comforts of your gut. And then you can also be reinfected and here's how, right? So when the females are spurting out 1,000 to 30,000 eggs, take your pick on a daily basis. You're pooping those eggs out. And if you're pooping in say like by the bushes or in some sort of like outhouse. Yeah, it's 1875 in West Virginia.

You don't have indoor plumbing. Right, and let's say your outhouse isn't all that great. Or you're just, again, pooping in the bushes. You are probably not wearing shoes. Those two things usually go hand in hand. And so you're stepping in your old fecal material that still had eggs in it before. Those eggs have since hatched into larva,

gone through the first two larval stages, entered the third infective larval stage, and now it's crawling up into your foot again. And what's called worm burden is expanded even further from one or two to 10 to 20 to up to hundreds. Yeah, and that's if you just accidentally step in old poo, whether it's like spread around by animals, walking around or by the rain,

the chances are exponentially more if you have a good old fashioned poop slinging fight. Sure, you know. You don't want to get hit in the mouth with that. Oh my God. The other problem that was part of the problem was that, that was the second version of that even, was that people were using poop as fertilizer.

Now it's one thing, again, you can't really catch, I'm sure you can catch some worms. I know trick noses is a problem for humans and that's a pork worm. But you, using say horse manure is relatively safe compared to using human manure as fertilizer in your field. That's a relatively recent discovery.

People were using human manure as fertilizer for a very, very long time. And it was called night soil because at night the guys would come out and clean your, your privy out and walk the muck, your poop, your fecal material down the street and collect more and collect more and then they would turn it into fertilizer.

They would say release the night soil right before they dumped it. Exactly, and it would be fertilizer and that'd be great to make your crops grow but it also just contaminate your entire field with hookworms and then little kids would go out and work the field, shoeless. Yep.

And they would become infected from that too. So there were all these really great opportunities for people to become infected by hookworms. By great, you mean awful. Right, yeah. But there, the hookworm habitat followed a certain line from about West Virginia down to I think East Texas. Yeah.

And beneath that line, that was the hookworm belt. Yeah, they called it that. And above it they used human manure for fertilizer too but they didn't have hookworm. It was in the South that the hookworm was a problem and it was a big problem it turned out. Yeah, it just occurred to me. We walked right past maybe the best band name

of all time in here. What? Wormburden. Oh yeah, Wormburden is pretty good. It's pretty good. All right, well that's the setup before we hit you with the social context. So let's take a little break here

and we'll talk a little bit more about my old kinfolk right after this. But first we are gonna open up to see if we can go back into the theme of daily life. We're gonna confine because we don't know that and understand how we'm gonna live mentally and mentally.

of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, hey dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through

life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. So before we broke, we talked about what the hookworm is and all the different, uh, myriad ways which it could spread from accidentally walking in poop to poop, slang in fights, night soil, nights, release the night soil, rolling in it to, uh, ultimately, erotically increase your worm burden. Um, so you found this great article called How a

Worm Gave the South a Bad Name by a woman named Rachel Newer. It's on Nova. Yeah, it was really good. And she is from the south and kind of wrote it from that point of view. Um, and I get the feeling like, like me, she kind of has long had to defend the American south as, hey, we're not a bunch of dumb lazy yokels because that was, you know, for a long time, um, and still continuing today to a certain degree astoundingly. Yeah, that notion kind of exists that if you're from the south, you're kind of slow, you may be a little dimwitted, you may be lazy. Sure. And this was, you know, for white folks, black folks, Native Americans, yeah, just something about the south made you you lazy and dumb, especially among the lower socioeconomic classes. And this wasn't just like

off the cuff, um, stereotyping. It was rooted. In fact, in reality, there was something different about people of the lower socioeconomic classes in the south specifically. If you put them side by side among, uh, the same socioeconomic classes of the north, the ones of the north would be like, let's shovel some coal, baby. And the ones in the south would be like, I'm just going to lay here down next to my wheelbarrow because I can't, I can't get up. And so southerners were, came to be seen as lazy, shiftless, couldn't be trusted to do an honest day's work. Yeah. And they just thought it was part of the southern character. Yeah. And this wasn't just, um, a perception. Like they literally lagged behind the north in terms of productivity, um, economic development. Right.

Uh, and we'll, you know, we'll talk about some of these statistics as we go. Well, plus the civil war didn't help anything either. Well, no, that was obviously a big setback. Right. So it would have been in the south and it would have been for any region, right? Yeah. At level of devastation and, um, death, but coupled with their already predisposition to this, that what came to be called the lazy germ, uh, was it just set it back even further. Yeah. And at one point, uh, in the American south, up to 40% amazingly, 40% of the population, uh, like you said, from southeastern Texas to West Virginia and all the way down, um, was infected with hookworm. Yes. That's a lot of people. I mean, it's obviously not a majority,

almost a majority. That would have been a dumb southerner. You got the hookworm. 40%. I mean, that's a lot of folks. It is a lot of folks. And that was the culprit behind this lazy shiftlessness among, uh, the poverty stricken southern poor and the rural, the poverty stricken rural southern poor was apparently the majority of the south from the end of the civil war up until the, I believe the mid 19th or mid 20th century. Um, your, if you were a southerner, it was likely that you were poor and did not live in the city until about the 40s. And there's a pretty clear demarcation line. If you did, if you were wealthy, uh, in the south or you were, uh, lived in the city in the south in the 19th and, uh, 20 early 20th century, you wore shoes, you had bedpans,

um, and you could probably avoid this. But if you didn't, like those are the 40%, they, it says in this article that it was almost impossible to avoid if you were poor and lived in the south. Right. Because you also didn't have very good sanitation. No. You were just, it was just perfectly set up for you to keep getting reinfected. Um, you know, every couple of years you'd shed a dead hookworm. But in that time, you probably would have taken on several more. All right. So what does this mean? If you get hookworm, like we said, it's, it's likely not going to directly kill you. Uh, you might die from a common cold. Um, you might die from malaria or typhoid fever or, you know, something else may ultimately take you out because your body is so weakened.

But, uh, what it does in large part is it causes an iron deficiency. Yeah. Uh, if you're a pregnant woman or a kid, iron deficiency is really bad. Um, if you're a child, you need that iron for your brain development. So yeah, you know, not only would you get like physical symptoms like stomach bloat. Uh, what, what was the, uh, the eye thing like this, the dole fishy stare, fishy-eyed stare. Yeah. Just sort of like, they're basically described these kids as sort of vacant. Right. Just staring off into space. Yeah. Um, so, you know, some of those are physical symptoms, but others were literally like a lower IQ. Right. And so they, they believe that an Americanus came over as a result of the Atlantic slave trade that it was imported from Africa. Yeah.

So for centuries, generations of kids, um, were being born in the South who had their, um, they were physically and developmentally stunted. Yeah. By hookworm infections. Yeah. It sometimes girls wouldn't, um, begin menstruation. Uh, boys a lot of times would not even hit their growth spurts. So not only were they, uh, had lower IQs and learning, uh, you know, development disabilities, but they were smaller and weaker. Yeah. And then you combine this loss of blood. So, so apparently about a hundred worms in a, in a normal adult will drink about a teaspoon a day, which doesn't sound like that much. But if you couple it that level of iron deficiency. Yeah. With, uh, preexisting malnourishment due to poverty or the lack of availability of like good food.

Yeah. Uh, then it really becomes a huge problem. It goes from like, this is a problem to this is, this is a catastrophic problem that can keep an entire region of a country down productive, productively. Yeah. And it, uh, like a lot of disease we've talked about, whether it's like famine or lack of clean water, it's, it's cyclical in nature. So it would occur where there was poverty and then it would keep people from working to work their way out of poverty. Right. And it just kind of compounded on each other. Right. And then think about slavery as well. Right. So not only have you been brought over to the U S as a slave, you're being forced to work against your will in these horrific conditions. You're also being forced to work and live in these same

conditions that promotes hookworm. So you're feeling lazy and shiftless. T S for you. Yeah. You're a slave. Add that to your, uh, toil and misery. Right. You know, like it just, it just keeps getting worse. All right. So I think we've made it clear. Big problem in the south. But again, no one had any idea why. Yeah. It was just, you know, the lazy south and it's, you know, people have said it, that it literally set the south back like decades and decades from, uh, the rest of the country. Right. No one knows what's going on until 1902. This dude came along and they should be kind of a weird movie to market. But this would be a good movie, I think. Oh, I think so too. The story of Charles Stiles and hookworm. It's a big roller coaster ride. All

right. So, uh, 1902, this guy named Charles Stiles comes along. He's a zoologist, uh, from, from New York city. Educated in Europe, no less. So he played real well in the south. Yeah, which as you'll see, it was a bit of part of the problem. Uh, and the department of agriculture said, Hey, we need you to help these farmers down there, keep their animals healthy. So go down there and check things out. And he was like, he started to notice. He's like, something's going on. These people are physically stunted. They're a little off. Yeah. They're mentally stunted. And I don't think they're just dumb and lazy. So he started, apparently he sounds like one of these guys that was just had to get to the bottom of something, you know, right? Like he wouldn't

just say, you know, oh, well, everyone's right about how it is down here. Right. So he really stuck to his, uh, instinct and realized that it was hookworm. Yeah. He literally was the guy who discovered that that was the problem. Exactly. I think he, um, he did that by analyzing stool samples. So he basically just hung around men's rooms and said, like, you're going to use that. And they'd say, no, have at it. He just said, I was educated in Europe, by the way. Right. Exactly. And, uh, the people would just walk away. All right. Is that how it went down? I don't know how it went down. I looked. Actually, this guy is not the most celebrated person to ever save an entire region from an infection. Um, so there's not, I didn't find a lot of background information

on him in particular. Um, so I have no idea how it happened. I saw somewhere that said that he became accidentally infected and that's how he understood. Didn't see it backed up anywhere else. I have no idea how this man came to say the aha moment. Right. Yeah. Because again, you got to, you have to be trading in fecal material here. So right. Like this guy had his hands on human poop at some point, right? Or thought to look there. I'm not sure. Maybe he was in a good old fashioned poop sling invite. It makes the most sense that he, he was, he's like, something's wrong. Oh God. Oh, it's a worm. Uh, the point is though, he was not well received. The local doctors didn't want to hear it. They wouldn't listen. They dismissed him as,

you know, this, this carpet bag in Yankee from Europe who, uh, you know, educated in Europe who's down here telling us, right? You know, he's, he's an animal expert and he's telling us about our poop making us lazy. Yeah. Go back to Europe. You're an animal expert. Yeah. They, they really didn't listen to him much. So he was like, fine, I'll just go to John D. Rockefeller and tell him, I'm going to tell on you. That's basically what happened. Yeah. Rockefeller was, this is at the time when income inequality was about at the levels it was now and the wealthy industrialists of the age were really, really worried that they were going to have the social order overthrown by angry people. So they invented philanthropy, right? Yeah. This is back when they worried about

that kind of thing. All right. And Rockefeller said, well, we can't just, we can't do anything to actually support the problems that capitalism creates because then we'll just be drawing attention to the fact that there are major problems with the capitalist system. Yeah. What else can I support? And he heard about styles and styles took a meeting with Rockefeller and some of his, his higher up friends. And apparently at that meeting, they closed the deal like we're funding this thing with the million bucks right out of the gate, which is about 26 million today. And they set up the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the eradication of hookworm disease. That's right. But despite the fact that they were trying to help Southerners, not only with a medical issue, but to advance

themselves as a people. Right. Again, the Southerners, A, they didn't want a light being shown on this problem. Right. Because it's gross and it has a stigma, but they didn't want, again, they didn't want these Yankees coming down there and saying they can fix you. Right. You know. And Rockefeller said T S. He said, I've got an oyster dish named after me. Maybe the best oyster dish besides raw. I'm glad you said that. Should we take a break? Yeah. All right. We're going to come back and talk a little bit about the road to eradication right after this on the podcast. Hey, dude, the nineties called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show. Hey, dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey, dude as our

jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the nineties. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co stars, friends and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take

you back to the nineties. Listen to Hey, dude, the nineties called on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I heart podcast frosted tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help this. I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael, um, Hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a

different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to frosted tips with the Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And we're back in Chuck. We had a, not just a jingle that was a real blues song. Yeah, people were like, man, somebody really made an authentic old blues sounding jingle. Just for this episode. No, that was the legendary blind Blake, uh, with his song hookworm blues, which was a real song about

the hookworm blues. Right. And I think blind Blake came up with that song in 1926, I believe. Yeah. And the fact that he is singing about hookworms, um, starting in the 1920s represents or just goes to show like how much progress was made between the time the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission was set up. Yeah. And blind Blake had his number one hit. And in between that time for, for promoting this idea that there was such thing as hookworm and that it was a real problem. Because when the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission was set up in 1909, the south was still in basically the, the grips of reconstruction. It wasn't the reconstruction era anymore as the Jim Crow south, but it was still really far behind as a result of the war.

And there were not a lot of public services available. So one thing the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission had going for it was money and that it was going to be money invested in public health. All right. So this is how they went about it. Uh, it's 1909. And like you said, they, uh, Rockefeller donated a million bucks, which is how much today? 26 million, 26 million. That's pretty good. Um, and they realized, well, I don't, I assume this was kind of a purposeful move. Um, that they got a Southerner on board to kind of help lead the charge. Definitely. Um, this, uh, person named, uh, Wycliffe Rose, great name. If there's a hero of the story, it's him, if you ask me. You think so? Uh-huh. Not, uh, what's his face? No. Styles? Yeah. No. All right.

I mean, he did some great work. It was good, but Wycliffe Rose was the one who, uh- Wycliffe? That's how I pronounced it. He was the one who made it happen. Cause, cause styles could have discovered hookworm all day long. Uh, but if he didn't have the, the personality to, to cure people, then it doesn't really help. So this would be Matthew McConaughey then. Right. In the movie. Yeah. So, and what in the styles? To be Paul Giamatti. And this is McConaughey coming in now. Uh, so they get this Southerner. He's from Nashville on board, uh, to run the organization. And they had this approach where they would go to a town that they would go to a town in the south with these doctors. But before they did that, they would start this, um, campaign,

like an awareness campaign, um, in schools to get. And as, I think we talked about in other things, you get the kids on board in schools and they kind of help get the parents on board. And they started this campaign to tell children about what's going on and the kids would in turn hopefully go home and tell their parents like, you know, my pa ain't dumb. I got the hookworm. Right. Look, my poop is wiggling away. Exactly. And, um, it was, you know, they had a challenge in front of them because, um, you know, you got a poop in a bag or something and give it to your teacher, your teacher and entire schools, these one room schoolhouses were infected. And this, this one kid they talked to later on said, uh, well, he was a kid at the time. Well, yeah,

he was scared. Like he said, he had constipation for a week. He didn't want to, like he didn't want to have hookworm. I don't want my teacher to know me in this way. Yeah, pretty much. I don't want to give my teacher a stool sample. Um, boy, yeah, never mind. But that was, but that was the whole setup, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like there was, there was, um, there was a public information campaign. That was part of it. There was community involvement. That was a really big thing that Wycliffe Rose started. He said, we can't do this without the support of the local community. Yeah. So they built networks with like doctors and local health boards. They got the schools involved. Um, and it became a community thing, right? Yeah. So once

you had the, the public onboard, uh, they would set up these clinics, um, not permanent, these kind of temporary clinics and they would, it was kind of a big deal in the town that it said that they would treat it like an event and people would bring picnics. I don't know if that's a wise thing to do at a hookworm clinic, but they would bring picnics and it says in here that they, uh, some people even wanted to get married in the hookworm tent. And I was like, that seems weird and kind of like kitschy, but then I also was like, I'll bet a lot of these people have never seen a tent before. So they were like, this is our one chance to just stand under a tent. Yeah. Yeah. Can we get married in the hookworm tent? And so, um, there'd be this public information campaign leading up to

the day of the hookworm day. You can just call it. Yeah. And a young doctor, a young doctor would ride into town on a horseback and he had a microscope and everything. He would, um, there was a couple parts to it. There was, um, the sanitation lecture, which was here's how you guys are getting hookworm. Here's how you build what's called the sanitary privy. Yeah. Like they couldn't give them indoor plumbing, but they could at least teach them how to have a nice enough outhouse. Right. And there's some very, very simple principles. One is like, don't, don't dig your, um, latrine down until you hit groundwater. Don't let it go out into the stream. Make sure animals can't get into it and like spread it around. Have a good door. Make sure your feet aren't standing in the same pit that

you're pooping in. It's really basic stuff, but like that was a big part of it. Right. Yeah. Um, and then also explaining how the infection process worked. Right. So because they understood very early on, um, that yes, you can get rid of hookworms fairly easily, but you can also get reinfected fairly easily. So they had to get that part across as well. Yeah. And like, again, you can't buy everyone shoes, but you can say, maybe don't play near the outhouse. You got to stop the poop slinging fights all together. Yeah. They just have to be gone. Thing of the past. That's the number one thing. They're part of the salad days. And then this, the sample analysis would begin and the poor doctor would just look with his microscope at each poop sample and say pass,

fail, pass, fail. And if the bag was vibrating, they didn't even have to look. Yeah. Like that, that cheese in Sardinia, I think. Oh yeah. With the maggots, the maggot cheese. Didn't we talk about a maggot episode? Surely we did. Or both. So, um, if you were found to be infected with worms, you would get very simple, um, pharmaceutical treatment. Really simple. Yeah. There's this extraordinarily toxic stuff called thymol. Yeah. T-H-Y-M-O-L. Yeah. And it would kill your worms. Yeah. And it could also kill you if you took it with the wrong combination of foods and or alcoholic beverages. Yeah. You wanted to avoid alcohol and fats and oils on the day you took it. And then you would follow your dose of thymol with epsom salt, which would remove the thymol from your

body. Yeah. And, uh, they said at some point, you know what, that stuff is super toxic. So, why don't we replace that with something called carbon tetrachloride? That must be much better. No, it was also very lethal. Uh, I guess they just, you know, at the time didn't have anything that wasn't also dangerous to take. Right. And that did the trick. And the fact that the epsom salt would get rid of it, I think helped quite a bit. Yeah. So the great end to this story would be if the Rockefeller's money was well spent and five to 10 years later, they eradicated hookworm in the south. Ta-da. Uh, but that didn't happen. Um, it was successful in a lot of ways. Uh, awareness kind of being the chief way. But as we said a few times, um, reinfection is kind of the biggest

problem. Right. Like you, they might have gotten rid of a lot of hookworm only, you know, to have these kids who couldn't help but have their poop slinging fights. Right. Uh, and then get hookworm all over again. Exactly. And so, but if you go and read the Rockefellers, um, the Rockefeller Foundation's, um, rundown of that program, they basically say it was this one guy who lobbied hard to like just move on, uh, whatever. It was somebody from the Rockefeller Foundation that said, we're done with this. We've done our work. Right. Gotcha. And they had, like you said, in a certain way, they had set up some of the earliest public health networks in the south. Yeah. They had convinced the south that there was such a thing as hookworm and that it was a big problem

and that if they were able to get rid of it, they could, um, catch up to the rest of the country. And they said, now the local doctors, now the local health clinics can take over from here. But again, yeah, it wasn't until the forties that, that hookworm really started to be eradicated. And it had very little to do with the pharmaceutical treatments. It was the fact that indoor plumbing became prevalent. Yeah. I mean, it was literally like better food, better plumbing, more shoes. The end of sharecropping, which was a type of, um, agricultural system that kept people poor and kept people in the fields. So it was, it, it kept the same unsanitary conditions for hookworm infection right there. Yeah. What did you call it now when they would dump the poop night?

Night soil. Yeah. No more night soil dumping. Yeah. Uh, mechanization started and it was kind of a combination of all these just the modernization of the American south is really what ended it. Um, and you know, the proof is kind of in the pudding in that today, in conditions similar to the American south a hundred years ago, plus in other parts of the world, it's still a really big problem. It is a really problem. Apparently something like I saw up to, um, in this article, the war on hookworms by Andy Borowitz, he says that up to something like 740 million people around the world are thought to have hookworm infections. Right. Yeah. Uh, about 40 to 50 million of which are pregnant women, which is, you know, obviously one of the, uh, one of the

worst, like we said, kids and pregnant women is one of the worst kind of people to get it and the saddest. Right. And, uh, mainly because it increases your chances of dying during childbirth because of anemia. Yeah. Right. Um, so it is a huge problem around the world. There's, uh, there, there's this kind of moniker for, um, uh, hookworm infection along with certain other infections. They're lumped together under the umbrella of neglected tropical diseases. Yeah. And the reason they're called that is because this is stuff that like you can easily get rid of if you alleviate poverty right in the, the, uh, developing world, but we're not doing that and it's out of neglect basically. Yeah. It's not, it's not the kind of thing where, uh, you can

just invent the vaccine and it's gone, but again, because of the reinfection because these people are still poor and still in those conditions. Um, we're talking at some of the highest rates are Sierra Leone, uh, Democratic Republic of Congo, uh, Nigeria, Ethiopia, India, Venezuela, Indonesia. Um, also interestingly, um, China and Brazil, which kind of surprised me. Yeah. Well, it's the same thing as like the, uh, the South back in the day where you have very, very, um, or well off urban areas and very, very, very poor rural areas. Same thing in parts of China and Brazil today. Yeah. And I think another reason, um, at least this article you sent kind of makes the argument that it's, uh, still a problem. In fact, since 1990, it's declined globally by just

5%. Yes. This is really sad. Despite the fact that something like 450 million people have been treated for hookworm. Yeah. But that declines. It's only gone down 5%. And all, what that's saying is, as long as there's the unsanitary conditions, there's going to be hookworm, right? So we have to alleviate the unsanitary conditions and you do that by alleviating poverty. And there's a group of, of foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, World Health Organization, they've gotten together to create this N7 program and that's, they're trying to end seven of the neglected tropical diseases by 2020 and hookworm is one of them. And there's treatments. There's, it's really easy to get rid of hookworm. There's actually

a couple of ironic treatments for hookworm. One medication for getting rid of hookworm, prevents the hookworms from creating ATP, which is like an energy source. So they become lethargic and die just like they make you lethargic. The other medication attaches the, to the hookworm's intestines and prevents the hookworm from absorbing nutrients. So they die of malnourishment, just like they make people malnourished. I don't know if it's ironic or if they're like, we're going to get these things back. Right. Yeah. So like I was saying a minute ago, part of the big problem with eradicating this is that it's not, it's not a big news item. Like, you know, a lot like Ebola comes along, it grabs all the news and all of a sudden you

have a lot of funding. Hookworm isn't, you know, I don't want to say a sexy disease because it's gross, but it's not, it's kind of just off forgotten. And so they don't have a lot of funding. I'm glad that Gates is involved because that, you know, that makes it much more high profile. Right. But, you know, it's still a big, big issue and hopefully, you know, this will help raise a little bit of awareness. Sure. Well, if hookworm is eradicated by 2020, we'll have played a rather large role in that. But now we have a final twist. Right. Yeah. There is this really great quote from the 60s from a Rockefeller parasitic worm specialist who said that we needed the eventual hell mythic defaul nation of man saying getting rid of worms from the human

race entirely, right? Right. And he said that for only in a society made up of parasite free individuals, well, we know of what the human being is capable, basically saying like, we have no idea how much we're being held back as as an entire race by worms. So we need to get rid of them. But there's this growing body of research, Chuck, that's showing that we actually need to be infected by hookworms. It looks like well, if it can potentially treat a few types of disease. I wouldn't say that humans need it. But right now, there's some experimental research going on. And specific to hookworms, it seems that it might help asthma. Okay. There are other worms that they're using that could help with everything from

ulcerative colitis to Crohn's disease to multiple sclerosis. But when it comes to the little hookworm, they think it might help asthma. They're not experimenting on humans yet in the United States. I don't think I think only in the United Kingdom right now are they using this in humans. But because it's hookworm, the side effects are basically all the things we've been talking about, right? You know, everything bad about the hookworm is going to happen to you. Right. The thinking behind it, though, because that makes zero sense, like why would that help, is that for some reason, parasitic worms prevent the human immune system from going overboard somehow, right? And that the reason why we have autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis or

Crohn's disease are because of a lack of parasitic worms in our bodies, because we've eradicated them. So now these other diseases that are autoimmune diseases have been able to rise. So it kind of is a, like you said, a weird little twist. Yeah, we'll see. I mean, right now they're mainly working in mice and rats. But like any time you're working with mice and rats, it's can't exactly extrapolate that on the humans. So we shall see. There's only one way to find out. For you and I to volunteer. Well, they, you know, I did see some experiments, not for this, but when they were doing hookworm experiments, period, they would infect people with hookworm. Right. And, you know, volunteers. Yeah. And again, I mean, like, it's not like a hookworm is going

to kill you. And if you are not going to get reinfected because you wear shoes and use like a toilet with running water, it's sure. Why not? You do it for science and money. Yes. You got anything else? I do not. Well, we want to recommend the articles how a worm gave the south bad name by Rachel Neewer and war on hookworms from Andy Borowitz. They're both well worth reading. And since I said they're well worth reading, it's time for a listener mail. All right, I'm going to call this follow up from a very sweet couple I met at the airport. I think I talked about them after our one, I think the Midwestern tour. Or no, no, no, it was Louisiana, New Orleans show. Okay. I met this very nice couple who had been to the show. They were, I think, one of our more

veteran and wise listeners in show attendees. Okay, they were wonderful. And they stopped me in the airport. We talked for a little bit. And this is from them. Hey, Chuck, I wanted to follow up after the show in New Orleans. We talked to you at the airport while we were waiting for a flight back to Minneapolis. You were very gracious talking to us when we clearly interrupted you on your way to do or get something. We told you our new hobby was going and following you guys around the country and making vacations that out of your shows on tour. Remember that? But we haven't made it to a live show since. We haven't done a lot of shows since. That's true. Well, we've done a handful. We've both been slacking, both parties. Yes, but we're going to hit the road for some

shows later this year, by the way. Sure. Stay tuned for that. So you and Josh did, however, inspire us and our new venture. We started a podcast just before we left to drive to Alaska in May. Joyce, who is the lady in the couple, downloaded a bunch of podcasts on how to make podcasts. By the time we got back to Minnesota, we were well on our way to starting Tall Tales and Travel, our podcast about adventures in the outdoors. Nice. Lair, and I don't know if it's L-A-R-R-E, and I can't remember if it was Lair or Larry. Lair is probably short for Larry. Maybe. L-A-R-R-E. Which is short for Lawrence, so it's doubly short. I'm going to call him Lair, or just L. He has decades worth of stories which have mostly taken place in Alaska. He's been a

bush pilot, charter boat captain, a police officer, and general outdoorsman to name a few adventure settings. Yeah, that's a Lair if I've ever heard of one. Lair does most of the talking, and Joyce does most of the behind the scenes tasks. It's a division of labor that we've mastered over the last 30 odd years together. We have a website, TallTalesandTravel.com, where we post photos and videos from Lair's huge archive. Now that we're up and running, we'll be putting more work into sorting and sharing the collection more regularly. By the way, we used Squarespace. Thanks for the tip. Nice. Anyway, guys, we're just writing in to thank you for the inspiration to let you know that we haven't given up on seeing you live again. We're going to keep our ears open,

and here where stuff you should know will be up next. Plan an adventure to see you there. All the best. That is Joyce Olsen and Lair Broward. Again, check it out at TallTalesandTravel.com or at TallTalesandTravel.LibsonLibsyn.com. They were just really sweet and nice and supportive, and the notion that these people in their retirement would follow us around the country just kind of knocked my socks off. I haven't listened to show yet because this just came in, but I'm going to give it a whirl. Thanks, you guys, and congratulations. It's pretty awesome. And I guess if we've inspired you, like Joyce and Lair, to do something neat, let us know about it. You can tweet to us at SYSKpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com

slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com, and as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance

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