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News Feature: The worm has turned

Nature Medicine volume 10, pages 1271–1272 (2004)Cite this article

Like many other villages in rural Africa, Lambaréné is filled with children infected with intestinal parasites. And like those villages, it too has negligible rates of asthma. Lambaréné is also home to the Albert Schweitzer Hospital, established by the famed doctor himself in 1913, and its medical research unit. For those reasons, the village has become the perfect crucible to test a long-standing theory—that parasitic worms, despite their ability to maim and kill, shield their victims from asthma and other allergies.

Since 1999, Maria Yazdanbakhsh, a biologist at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, has tested the theory in a group of Lambaréné's schoolchildren, about 70 percent of whom were infected with intestinal parasites.

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  1. Charlotte Schubert is Nature Medicine's News & Views editor,

    Charlotte Schubert

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  1. Charlotte Schubert
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Helminth infections

Helminth immunology

Maria Yazdanbakhsh

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Schubert, C. News Feature: The worm has turned. Nat Med 10, 1271–1272 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm1204-1271

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