Mass deworming program with SCI Foundation

Parasitic worm infections, chiefly schistosomiasis and soil-transmitted helminths, are estimated to affect over a billion people, concentrated in the world's poorest communities. Infection rarely kills. It grinds: anaemia, impaired development, missed school, organ damage over years, and reduced earnings across a working life.

The medicine is safe, taken by mouth, and costs very little per dose. Most programs treat school-age children, who carry the highest infection loads, by using schools as the delivery point and reaching whole communities in a single round. A single round can cut infection rates substantially, and repeated annual treatment keeps them down.

The work is done with national health ministries so that the capability stays in the country rather than arriving with an outside team and leaving with it. The organization supporting these programs is Unlimit Health, formerly the SCI Foundation.

Deworming is one of the more debated interventions in effective giving. The short-term health effects are modest and well established; the larger claim, that treated children go on to earn meaningfully more as adults, rests on long-term follow-up studies that researchers continue to argue about. It is included here because the cost per treatment is so low that even a conservative reading of the evidence leaves it competitive.

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