Middle East peace, climate change, Ukraine — if Sisyphus were assigned one of today’s global problems, he’d plead to be returned to rock rolling. So let’s focus for a moment on a global challenge that we can actually solve: starvation.
I suspect that some Americans — perhaps including President Trump — want to slash humanitarian aid because they think problems like starvation are intractable. Absolutely wrong! We have nifty, elegant and cheap solutions to global hunger.
Consider something really simple: deworming. I’m traveling through West Africa on my annual win-a-trip journey, in which I take a university student along on a reporting trip, and every day we see children plagued by worms that aggravate their malnutrition. Nutrients go to their parasites, not to them.
While worms are worthy antagonists — a female worm can lay 200,000 eggs in a day — aid agencies can deworm a child for less than $1 a year. This makes them stronger, less anemic and more likely to attend school. Researchers have even found higher lifetime earnings.
In the United States we spend considerable sums deworming pets; every year I spend $170 deworming my dog, Connie Kuvasz Kristof. Yet deworming the world’s children has never been as high a priority as deworming pets in the West, so we tolerate a situation in which one billion children worldwide carry worms.
My win-a-trip winner, Sofia Barnett of Brown University, and I are reminded in every village we visit of the toll of hunger. Malnutrition leaves more than one-fifth of children worldwide stunted, countless millions cognitively impaired and vast numbers (especially menstruating women and girls) weak from anemia. Malnutrition is a factor in 45 percent of child deaths worldwide.
