Fiat Vox

Carol Nekesa doesn’t know if she was ever infected by parasitic worms. But it’s likely, she says, since most kids in her community had them. “It was just a normal part of childhood,” she says. Carol grew up in the 1980s in a rural village in Busia County, Kenya. Like many regions in Sub-Saharan Africa at the time, Busia lacked the infrastructure for clean water and modern sanitation, leading to the pervasive spread of infectious diseases. Parents feared deadly outbreaks like malaria and cholera, often unaware of the slower, hidden damage caused by intestinal worms. The symptoms — fatigue, diarrhea, weight loss, stunted growth — rarely made headlines, yet they shaped children’s futures. At the time, more than a billion people worldwide, most of them children, were living with these infections, making parasitic worms one of the most widespread chronic health conditions on the planet.In 1998, two researchers — Ted Miguel, who is now an economics professor at UC Berkeley, and future Nobel laureate Micha