Econometric studies have shown that this effect cannot be explained by a variety of alternative factors, including differential trends across areas, changing crop prices, shifts in certain educational and health policies and the effect of malaria eradication. No significant contemporaneous results were found for adults who should have benefited less from the intervention owing to their substantially lower (prior) infection rates. The program nearly eradicated hookworm and would flourish afterward with new funding as the Rockefeller Foundation International Health Division.The RFs hookworm campaign in Mexico showed how science and politics play a role in developing health policies. It brought together government officials, health officials, public health workers, Rockefeller officials and the community. This campaign was launched to eradicate hookworms in Mexico. Although the campaign did not focus on long-term treatments, it did set the terms of the relationship between Mexico and the Rockefeller Foundation. The scientific knowledge behind this campaign helped shape public health policies, improved public health and built a strong relationship between US and Mexico.In the 1920s, hookworm eradication reached the Caribbean and Latin America, where great mortality was reported among people in the West Indies towards the end of the 18th century, as well as through descriptions sent from Brazil and various other tropical and sub-tropical regions. Treatments
Treatment in the early 20th century relied on the use of Epsom salt to reduce protective mucus, followed by thymol to kill the worms. By the 1940s, tetrachloroethylene was the leading method.
Blood tests in early infection often show a rise in numbers of eosinophils, a type of white blood cell that is preferentially stimulated by worm infections in tissues (large numbers of eosinophils are also present in the local inflammatory response). Falling blood hemoglobin levels will be seen in cases of prolonged infection with anemia. In contrast to most intestinal helminthiases, where the heaviest parasitic loads tend to occur in children, hookworm prevalence and intensity can be higher among adult males. The explanation for this is that hookworm infection tends to be occupational, so that coworkers and other close groups maintain a high prevalence of infection among themselves by contaminating their work environment. However, in most endemic areas, adult women are the most severely affected by anemia, mainly because they have much higher physiological needs for iron (menstruation, repeated pregnancy).An interesting consequence of this in the case of Ancylostoma duodenale infection is translactational transmission of infection: the skin-invasive larvae of this species do not all immediately pass through the lungs and on into the gut, but spread around the body via the circulation, to become dormant inside muscle fibers. In a pregnant woman, after childbirth some or all of these larvae are stimulated to re-enter the circulation (presumably by sudden hormonal changes), then to pass into the mammary glands, so that the newborn baby can receive a large dose of infective larvae through its mothers milk.