Recently, however, journalists and bloggers have claimed that deworming has been “debunked” as a cost-effective way to improve children’s school participation.
“The blogosphere is buzzing” about epidemiologists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine “who carried out the verification and reanalysis of a landmark 2004 trial of school-based deworming,” says Paul Gertler, a professor of public health and business at UC Berkeley. The London team “does verify that deworming increases school attendance in a ‘pure’ replication of the study,” he notes, “but they also carry out a statistical re-analysis… that introduces several unconventional judgments into the mix.”
“Data mining” by the epidemiologists, and the subsequent “media frenzy” around children’s deworming, represent a major step backward in global health, Gertler writes on the Berkeley Blog.