[Granville-Hough] 29 Mar 2009 -

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2009 05:47:53 -0800
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Subject: The Treatment - 29 Mar 2009

Scourge of Sullivans Hollow: Hookworm and The Treatment.

My niece, Carol Linger, was once reading some 1936 correspondence from 
my younger brother, Donald, to her father and our oldest brother, 
Harold. She had found a phrase Donald had used she did not understand. 
Donald had explained in his letter that we had taken the treatment, 
but that we were otherwise all right.
Harold, after our fathers death in May 1936, looked after our health 
needs and helped our mother make various decisions about our future. He 
had observed we looked small and anemic, relative to other children; and 
he wondered why. He knew we had a good, healthy diet. He determined we 
might have hookworm, as we persisted in going barefooted; and we had 
indeed had bouts with ground itch (like athletes foot), an infection 
between the toes.
He got feces samples from each of us, which he sent to the Jackson State 
Board of Health to be analyzed for hookworm. Indeed we were infected. He 
then got the prescribed treatment, later considered too dangerous to be 
administered outside a hospital setting.
A little background on the hookworm. It was endemic in the South until 
World War II, and it could be found wherever people went barefooted and 
had no plumbing or privies. The worm was barely visible to the naked 
eye, but it got into the intestine and attached itself to the intestinal 
wall where food was absorbed into the body. It fed on the blood 
interface. When the worms were mature, they laid their eggs which passed 
out of the body in feces. The eggs hatched and the tiny larvae lived in 
the feces or in the topsoil under the feces residue. When a barefooted 
human came by, the larvae got between the toes and entered the blood 
vessels there. That gave the recipient the condition we called ground 
itch, frequently confused with athletes foot. The tiny larvae went 
through the blood stream to the heart, then to the lungs, then got into 
the throat and were swallowed with regular food. In the intestine, they 
attached themselves, where they lived and laid eggs for about five 
years. With a severe infection, you could lose a pint of blood each day. 
You also spread the eggs wherever you defecated.
The treatment was to get a chemical into the small intestines which 
would be powerful enough to kill the hookworms permanently attached to 
the intestinal walls. I do not remember the name, but it was powerful 
stuff. You had to take it in such a way it did not burn your mouth or 
throat. We put it in a small spoonful of sugar and swallowed it straight 
down. We could feel it burn as it went down. Of course, we took it on an 
empty stomach. The effect was an intense diarrhea for about 24 hours, 
while your small intestinal wall was stripped and defecated. Our older 
brother, Dueward, had set an example for us by taking the treatment with 
us. The effect on him was so great that he swore he would never take 
another one, even if he passed black runners, our most common snake. 
And he lived up to that statement. However, he did not again go bare 
footed. You would get free of the worms naturally if you wore shoes for 
five years and had no reinfestation. He took the five year option and 
outlived the hookworms.
After the treatment you got back to normal and took another sample of 
feces to sent to the State Health lab in Jackson. In order to do this, 
you had to take the samples to the nearest county seat, which in our 
case in Smith County was Raleigh. Harold had obtained the proper 
containers and instructions for putting the names on each. I labeled the 
containers and got the samples from each of us. Then I had to take them 
to Raleigh. We had just purchased an International pickup truck and I 
was learning to drive it. I was age 13. I had never driven as far as 
Raleigh, so it was a first trip and a big experience. I managed to get 
there and find the courthouse and eventually the County Health Office. I 
was still in grade school but tall enough to see over the counter, but I 
had to deal with some big girls, probably high school interns. The 
County Nurse was out on some business.
I was extremely embarrassed as I had to explain to these big girls that 
I had four samples of feces which had to be sent to the State Health 
Office in Jackson. I knew three words I could use: feces, excrement, or 
shit. I stuck to feces, which they had never heard before. (I think they 
eventually opened one of the containers, after which they conducted our 
business quite quickly.) We got the postal cards back from Jackson a few 
days later that we were still infected. Then we took the second round of 
treatment and again took the samples to Raleigh. This time the big girls 
remembered very well and quickly took care of my request. Later, when we 
got our postal cards back from Jackson, we were free of infection. 
However, the recommendations were that we take one more round of 
medicine as insurance, which we did. We then wore shoes as a permanent 
measure for preventing infection.
I do not know how much the hookworms affected our growth and health, 
overall. I do know they did no good. So when Donald wrote to Harold that 
we had taken the treatment, we all knew what that meant, even Dueward. 
There was a casualty rate associated with home use of the treatment, 
and eventually it was replaced by another less toxic medicine. However, 
we had survived the tough stuff and never got acquainted with the less 
dangerous pills.



P. S. 5. "Can any (drug) policy, however high-minded, be moral if it 
leads to widespread corruption, imprisons so many, has so racist an 
effect, destroys our inner cities, wreaks havoc on misguided and 
vulnerable individuals and brings death and destruction to foreign 
countries?" Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize Winner, Economics