I'm glad it wasn't in that lab but that's how it has to be detected.' 'It means looking at fecal samples to see if the eggs are gone. 'They had to drink these tea infusions daily for seven days and then you would see what happened to their worm infestations, which is not a pretty thing to do,' she says with a laugh.

In a new study published this month, she reports that sweet wormwood tea can cure schistosomiasis faster and with fewer side effects than the most common drug treatment. Half were treated with the drug, and half got wormwood tea. So along with her colleagues she ran a trial on 800 people in the Maniema Province in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, all of whom had schistosomiasis. She figured wormwood might also kill the worms that cause schistosomiasis. Pam Weathers, a biologist at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, has spent a lot of time studying how artimisinin and other derivatives of the wormwood shrub attack malaria parasites in people. The standard treatment is a drug called praziquantel - three doses spread out over the course of one day can cure most people of the worms that cause schistosomiasis.īut what if tea from a local plant worked just as well? In parts of Africa and South East Asia where schistosomiasis is rampant, people can be infected for years before they start feeling sick. The worm invasion may cause a fever or some abdominal pain but most people don't realize something's wrong. As the parasite population grows the person starts to feel sluggish, slightly off. The host still feels fine, doesn't even know he or she is infected.

Human worms with flat head rope worm