Belinda Smith
speaker
2,605 appearances
27 recordings
4 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 3d ago
Belinda Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 27 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 6.
Appearances
But if you're infected with just a modest number, like I am, I don't lose enough blood to become anaemic.
I have absolutely zero symptoms and people who have a light or moderate intensity infection don't have much in the way of symptoms.
Where these worms become a problem, and hookworm is a problem in a lot of developing countries, is when they infect undernourished individuals who aren't getting enough food supply and therefore are susceptible to developing anaemia.
Iron deficiency anaemia is the type of anaemia you get with hookworm.
And the more worms people harbour, the more blood loss they experience.
That's when you experience the clinical effects of a hookworm infection.
Alex, how did you get those hookworms in you?
Ah, the tortuous journey.
That infective larval stage is only about 0.1 millimetre long and they penetrate through the skin.
So the way that I got infected and the way we infect all the people in our clinical trials is we take worms that have been cleaned up and made as sterile as possible and we put them in a little drop of water and we put them on the skin.
For me and for a lot of our volunteers, it's on the forearm.
We'll put a small drop of water on the forearm and within seconds those larvae detect the skin and they actively burrow through it.
Yum, I mean, or rather yuck, depending on which side you're on.
But the fact that they manage to survive, they're doing things to the human body which means that they're sustainable and in some ways it's good for you.
In what way?
So these worms are purely selfish little buggers.
All they want to do is sit in your gut, eat, have sex and stay there for years.
They're separate males and females when they're adults.
They find each other and they pretty much mate for most of their life consistently.
And the female will produce about 10,000 to 15,000 eggs per day, each female worm.
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