Worms and vaccine responses

We  expected that treatment of the mothers’ worms would result in improved responses to vaccines in the children, but this was not generally the case. The only result that fitted in with our hypothesis was that albendazole treatment modified the response to tetanus immunisation among children of mothers with hookworm. We discuss the possible explanation for this in our papers on this topic (Elliott et al 2010, Webb et al, 2011).