Earthworms, Roundworms

Last week two learned pharmacologists bickered politely over intestinal worms. The roundworm, which resembles the earthworm in form, is the most common parasite which infests the intestines of human beings. Children between the ages of three and ten are especially good hosts for these worms. Male roundworms grow four to eight inches long, females seven to twelve inches. In some cases as many as 1,000 have been found, but usually only half a dozen roundworms infest an intestine. They live on blood drained from the intestinal wall.

Such worms may travel from the intestines to the stomach whence they may be vomited, to the nose, to the middle ear, to the larynx where they occasionally cause fatal suffocation, to the common bile duct where they may cause jaundice, to the pancreas, to the vermiform appendix. A child who suffers from digestive disturbances, capricious appetite, abdominal pains, gas, vomiting, restlessness and irritability, itchy nose, grinding of the teeth, foul breath, headache, dizziness, cough, convulsions, anemia, peakedness may be suffering from roundworms.

Because roundworms and earthworms look alike, from time immemorial the lethal effects of roundworm vermicides have first been tried on earthworms before application to humans. Only last spring Pharmacologist Glenn Llewellyn Jenkins of the University of Maryland, chemist and assiduous inventor of synthetic drugs, published an article in the Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association on "Rational Use of the Earthworm for the Evaluation of Vermicides." This profoundly agitated Pharmacologist Paul Dudley Lamson of Vanderbilt University, caused him to write a vigorous rebuttal which Science published last week. Snapped Professor Lamson: "The human Ascaris [roundworm] is a parasitic animal living in the gut of man. It has no respiratory or circulatory system in any way related to that of an earthworm. It can live under anaerobic [without free oxygen] conditions. The earthworm is a free-living species inhabiting not man, but the ground. It feeds on substances in the soil rather than those of the human gut. It has no chitinous coat. It is dependent upon a circulatory system with not merely a single heart but five pairs of these organs through which circulates blood containing both corpuscles and hemoglobin. Except for its shape, there is nothing which under any consideration could be used as an excuse for taking such an animal as a test object for ascaricides, especially when one can obtain with great ease pig Ascaris, which are morphologically indistinguishable from the human Ascaris."

Then Professor Lamson revealed for the first time that he had tried out 121 widely different chemical substances on both earthworms and pig roundworms, found only seven which killed both kinds with equal efficiency. More than half the 121 vermicides killed earthworms quickly, had no effect on the roundworms.

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