Thomas Goetz

At first, it worked.

the League and a successor group, the American Medical Liberty League, they managed to delay approval of what was called the Medical Octopus, a stronger national health organization.

But by the time of the New Deal and more effective drugs and treatments in the 1930s, the opposition faded, though it did not disappear.

That idea of defending medical freedoms against mainstream medicine, does that sound familiar?

That idea would not die.

It has not died.

So now back to hookworm.

That was eliminated in the Southern U.S.

more or less by the 1950s, though it's not entirely gone from the South.

And it still appears in dogs and cats and horses nationwide.

And hookworm is still sadly common around the world.

Which takes us to another worm.

Let's follow our drug story to Africa to meet another parasitic disease, river blindness.

In the villages of sub-Saharan Africa, in countries like Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon, people depend on rivers.

Because that is where the food is, where the water is.

That's where the work is.

That's from a 1983 documentary about river blindness.

The black flies bite, and when they bite, they transmit the larvae of a worm called Onchocerca volvulus.

The worm grows and breeds under the skin.

The human body generally tolerates the adult worms with a low immune response.