Sarge will never bemoan his cat allergy again!

This was an amazing article about a new possible therapy for allergy sufferers.

The Worms Crawl In

In 2004, David Pritchard applied a dressing to his arm that was crawling
with pin-size hookworm larvae, like maggots on the surface of meat. He left the
wrap on for several days to make sure that the squirming freeloaders would
infiltrate his system.

I love it when scientists face so much resistance to their theories that they perform the initial experiments on themselves to proove they are not dangerous.

“The allergic response evolved to help expel parasites, and we think the
worms have found a way of switching off the immune system in order to survive,”
he said. “That’s why infected people have fewer allergic symptoms.”

This is a pretty old hypothesis, but it's a nice summary that everyone can understand.

[H]e completed his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Birmingham on that
topic. Afterward, he was an allergist at a pharmaceutical company, but the
work bored him In the late 1980s, the Wellcome Trust issued a grant, and Dr. Pritchard and his Nottingham team set up camp on Karkar Island, Papua New Guinea. “We didn’t speak the language, and we were sparsely equipped,” he recalled. “But we established a rapport with the people. We gave them worm tablets and would ask them politely, in pidgin English, to collect their fecal matter in buckets for
us.”

That must have been an interesting conversation.

Some allergy sufferers cannot wait. The moderator of the Yahoo group,
Jasper Lawrence, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, has started a clinic in Mexico,
to offer the unproven therapy (a basic worm “inoculation” costs $3,900).

Paying money to get a hookworm infection. Brilliant. Perhaps this is where those internet ads come from, "I work at home and earn $3000-$5000 a day." My clinic will be opening soon.

“We’re looking at the molecular mechanisms the worms are using, and we’re
hoping to find molecules that veer the immune response away from allergy,” he
said. A new class of drugs that mimics worms’ effects on the immune system
could also potentially treat Crohn’s disease, arthritis and other autoimmune conditions.Though he eventually hopes to eliminate hookworms entirely from his allergy treatment, Dr. Pritchard has few qualms about venturing where no parasite researcher has gone before. “I gave myself 50 worms, and I felt it,” he recounted. “I had stomach pains and diarrhea. But with 10 worms, we’ve ascertained a dose that does not cause symptoms. The patients are happy. They’ve kept their worms, and I get an e-mail a day from people all over the world who want to be infected.”

If they can distill the parasite's effect into a drug... Nobel Prize baby.