America is a myth, and here’s yet more proof. While Wall Street thieves wipe their asses with thousand dollar bills and paunchilly content middle-aged prols thrill to an orgy of shoe shopping and glorified self-absorption in a Sex And The City movie, the health and vitality of America’s poor is being drained by worms and parasites. Worms and parasites. In America. Today. As if the poor and disadvantaged didn’t have it hard enough.
"Throughout the American South during the early twentieth century, malaria combined with hookworm infection and pellagra (a vitamin deficiency) to produce a generation of anemic, weak, and unproductive children and adults," writes Dr. Peter Hotez of George Washington University and the Sabin Vaccine Institute in Washington DC.
Says Hotez, these same diseases have not gone away in America – they continue to afflict today. "These diseases occur predominantly in people of color living in the Mississippi Delta and elsewhere in the American South, in disadvantaged urban areas, and in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, as well as in certain immigrant populations and disadvantaged white populations living in Appalachia," writes Hotez.
"It's amazing what we tolerate," said Hotez. Pointing out that while the U.S. spends $1 billion a year preparing for outbreaks of diseases that have not occurred, such as avian influenza, "these (other) diseases are occurring among voiceless people. It's an unintended form of racism in a sense. We need to make these disease household words."