Deworming school children in Ethiopia: The importance of a comprehensive approach

Introduction: A quarter of the world's population, most commonly in developing countries like Ethiopia, are infected with intestinal parasites.School age children are the most affected segment of the population.The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends periodic deworming of all at-risk people living in endemic areas.Methods: In 2009, Ben Gurion University, in partnership with the NALA Foundation and in collaboration with the Organization for Social Services and AIDS (OSSA), an Ethiopian non-governmental organization, and the health and education bureau of Tigray Regional State, launched a deworming project for school children in Mekele City, Ethiopia.During its four years of implementation (2009-2012), we evaluated the effi cacy of this intervention in controlling helminthic infection in participating schools.The program entailed a comprehensive approach, combining intensive health education with water sanitation and mass drug administration and with pre-and post-intervention stool surveys, during each year of the intervention.Results: A total of 23,214 students were dewormed in four annual deworming campaigns.The results of the sequential stool surveys demonstrated a signifi cant and consistent decrease in the prevalence of both schistosomiasis and soil-transmitted helminthes infection in all the school children who participated in the project, and was sustained throughout the intervention period, decreasing from 52.8% at the beginning to 6.4% at the end.Conclusions: Results suggest that a comprehensive program, which combines mass drug administration with health education and water sanitation, can lead to sustained control of helminthic infections in school children living in highly endemic areas for these infections.Though continued evaluation of this program is warranted to determine how long and permanent such a control can last, deworming programs of this type are likely to prove useful throughout Ethiopia and other developing countries where these infections are highly common and where their long-lasting control is greatly needed.