The Evidence

The benefits of school-based deworming are immediate. Deworming in schools reduces school absenteeism by 25% and with the low cost of treatment it was found that an additional aggregate year of schooling could be gained by this program for only $3.50.

School-based deworming has been identified by the J-PAL as one of the most cost-effective ways to increase school participation of any approach rigorously tested. Deworming has also been identified by a group of Nobel Laureates and other economists at the Copenhagen Consensus Center as one of the most efficient and cost-effective solutions to global challenges facing us today.

Deworming has also been highlighted in several studies as having significant, positive impacts on children’s health, cognitive function and education achievement 

For more information on the impact and cost-effectiveness of deworming, we recommend the following key documents:

Jukes MCH, Drake LJ and Bundy DAP (2008) “Health, nutrition, and educational achievement of school-age children.” School Health, Nutrition and Education For All. Levelling the Playing Field, pp 86-92. 

Levelling the Playing Field provides an overview of the challenges to school-age children’s health and nutrition, and the impact of these on education.  This particular section provides a comprehensive review of the evidence on the impact of worms on the health, nutrition, education and overall development of school-age children.

Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (2012) Policy Bulletin. Deworming: A Best Buy for Development

This briefcase reports on a number of rigorous randomized studies of interventions improving school attendance, and found that deworming was more cost-effective than all other methods studied. Mass school-based deworming can increase school participation by at least 0.14 years of schooling per child treated.

Miguel, Edward and Michael Kremer (2004) Worms: Identifying Impacts on Education and Health in the Presence of Treatment Externalities. Econometrica, Vol. 72, No. 1, pp. 159-217.

This rigorous randomized evaluation helped establish the case for school-based deworming as a highly effective intervention for reducing school absenteeism.  The results also show that by treating school-age children there are substantial health and education benefits to the wider community, and these externalities are large enough to justify fully subsidizing treatment.

Bleakley, Hoyt (2007) Disease and Development: Evidence from Hookworm Eradication in the American South. Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 122, No. 1, pp. 73-117.

This study helped establish school-based deworming as an efficient investment in human capital by evaluating the economic consequences of the successful eradication of hookworm disease from the American South.

Brooker S., Hotez PJ and Bundy DAP (2010) The Global Atlas of Helminth Infection: Mapping the way forward in neglected tropical disease control. PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases 4, e779.

Reliable and updated maps of helminth (worm) infection distributions are essential to target treatment to populations in greatest need.  The Global Atlas of Helminth Infection (GAHI) is an open-access, global information resource on the geographic distribution of soil-transmitted helminths (STH) and schistosomiasis. The GAHI website was launched on August 1, 2010 at http://www.thiswormyworld.org/.