ABSTRACT
This chapter explains about worms. More specifically it is about a group of helminths – parasitic worms that inhabit the intestines of all vertebrate animals. Deworming programmes have significantly diminished human helminth infections around the world, but they remain prevalent in parts of the Global South, especially in impoverished rural areas in Africa. The chapter traces the entangled relations between people and myriad other lifeforms to flag the manifold agencies and political ecologies that shape human health. It offers a topological reading of the spatial biopolitics of health that conceives hookworm disease and epidemics of absence as emergent from the intensities of interspecies relations. Parasitologists have recorded over 300 species of helminth that parasitise human. Many of these are rare or accidental, but about 90 species are commonly found in human bodies. 'Eradicating' hookworm in the south of the USA was the founding concern of the Rockefeller Foundation's Sanitary Commission.
