Wow - from page 29:

A study conducted in rural KwaZulu Natal among school children (median age 11) found that 53% of girls and 37% of boys practiced geophagia; the practice decreased with age for boys but not for girls and was more common among children from families of higher socio-economic status

The WRC has a Research Project that involves geophagia (Research Project K5/2379). The Project is being led by Barbara "Bobbie" Louton from Partners in Development. I have attached a Draft Literature Review from that Project. As the Project is still on-going, researchers may cite it as Partners in Development (in prep), Research Report K5/2379, Water Research Commission, Pretoria. There is interesting info pulled by the research team from the different visits.

You may contact Bobbie herself (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) or Jay Bhagwan (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.).

[Start of Page 2 of the discussion thread]

Hi Joe,

I'm new to this forum, so please excuse any breaches of etiquette. I haven't read the whole thread, so forgive me if you've heard all this before.

The area of my practice is largely subtropical with hot and humid summers and warm dry winters. I suspect that the summer months, December, January and February, are the ones most enjoyed by helminths. There are two possible depths at which the ova could be acquired. Where "night soil" (human faeces) is used as a fertilizer it may be dug into the field or garden. Viable ova may then be deposited a spade's depth into the soil. More commonly surface contamination results in easier access! We looked at ova counts as an index of the severity of infestation and found some of our children were excreting 30,000 ova per gram of stool. If the worms all matured and were laid end to end they would stretch over 4 kms. Multiply that by the mass of the stool and the scale of the problem becomes clear!! I don't know anything about the survival of buried ova but their environment is likely to be warm and damp which would surely aid their survival.
I'm not aware of any data relating to soil temperatures, but there are a lot of things of which I am not aware. They probably exist somewhere.

Children may eat soil accidentally by sucking dirty fingernails or it may be given as part of a traditional potion. Pregnant women apparently do it to address a real or perceived mineral deficiency.
Hakuna matata

Larry Hadley

Wikipedia also has a page that explains quite well the current status of "helminthic therapy":
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy

The first sentence states:
"Helminthic therapy, an experimental type of immunotherapy, is the treatment of autoimmune diseases and immune disorders by means of deliberate infestation with a helminth or with the ova of a helminth."

I have no idea whether this Wikipedia page is accurate or not, I just wanted to mention its existence.

Apart from that I personally think this thread is becoming off-topic now (see Rule number 8 here: forum.susana.org/forum/rules) as the purpose of this forum is not to discuss all sorts of health hypotheses and alternative treatment methods for all sorts of ailments. There is other discussion forums for that out there. This is my personal opinion.


[End of Page 1 of the discussion thread]

Soil-based organisms in the form of SBO probiotics are now hugely popular for health. They have many functions including degrading biofilm and consuming fungi.

I agree, I wouldn't do it even though it's known to work. I've been recently speaking with someone who used worms to cure himself and promotes it. He never did try intensive probiotic therapy, however, using commensal microbes, Bifidobacteria and Lactobacillus, to displace overgrown pathogens (which are also commensal).

People do infect themselves, but it is a pretty stupid thing to do:

sciencenotes.ucsc.edu/2014/pages/hookworm/hookworm.html

"Most researchers and doctors say it’s still too early for people to safely infect themselves"

It is one thing to do this in a situation where there is good access to advanced medical care, something else altogether in a situation where ascaris is known to cause widespread untreated disease.

Clay is a known antimicrobial used in parasite cleansing including de-worming.

People use hookworms as therapy in gut diseases to regulate the immune system. My theory is worms are vacuuming-up microbial culprits like protozoans and gram-negative bacteria as that's what their tiny mouths are designed to eat. Overgrown, however, worms are thought to consume up to 20% of a child's daily nutritional intake.

Worms are also thought to manufacture vitamin C for the body.

Why is there any reason to distinguish between clay and soil? Is the ova can survive in soil, they can survive in clay.

The idea that having ascaris worms in your gut is somehow desirable is ridiculous.

A distinction should be made between eating clay and soil. Clay is commonly consumed in pregnancy. It's high in minerals and cleansing, binding toxins.
www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/04/02/297...eating-dirt-revealed

Still, plenty of animals eat feces (coprophagy), infusing the gut with probiotics.

Some "hygiene hypothesis" proponents actually promote poor sanitation as a way to balance the immune system. Worms have benefits, too, used in helminth therapy. But to promote poor sanitation isn't really the message. What we really need to promote is diversity and a balance of microbes, so the hygiene hypothesis has been renamed "Old Friends hypothesis".

PS, those photos are awful. Respect to the medics..

Yes, that is interesting. At the very least that is telling us that the ascaris helminths are surviving in the soil and can be infectious when the soil is eaten.

It would be quite interesting to know where the soil is taken from for consumption - I assume near the surface (rather than subsurface), because I doubt there would be much movement of the ova through the soil.

But if that is true.. then it would be interesting to study the soil temperatures. In a hot dry climate, the soils might reach the very high temperatures we are told kill the helminths.