At that point, a friend at the World Bank suggested he test deworming. Few people in developed countries know about intestinal worms: parasitic infections that affect more than one billion people worldwide. They aren’t as dramatic as AIDS or cancer or malaria, because they don’t kill nearly as many people as those other conditions. But they do make children sick, and can be cured for pennies: off-patent drugs, developed in the 1950s, can be distributed through schools and administered by teachers, and will cure children of intestinal worms for a year.
