Here, There & Elsewhere. Hooking up

Bins comes bustling into the room I call my studio. "Any chance you have hookworms?" he wants to know. "NO!" I say, feeling offended that he would even ask. "You are so disappointing," he says. "Poor Jiggs!–" our neighbour, the Indian pizza delivery guy "–Very little hope for him, in that case." Then he bustles out again without explaining what he means.

I am mystified until a little while later, Bins returns with Jiggs. "No, no," Bins is saying, in what he imagines is a friendly soothing voice, "it will be safe! It will be all right!" Then he turns towards me. "You have to write to this guy, Jasper Lawrence and get him to send us some of his hookworms!" Jiggs is looking very unhappy. He's also wheezing like an antique harmonium. "This is not a good idea," he says, squeaking painfully with every breath. "All my life, I have only heard that hookworms are horrible things. We must wash our hands before eating, wear shoes when we walk in the fields, run far away from worms. Now you tell me that I must catch them? It cannot be true!" He breaks off to cough and splutter.

"Do you have asthma, Jiggs?" I ask. I've not noticed it till this moment. "Never before," he confirms, "but last week I went out with DingDong–" his girlfriend "–to her friend who has a cat. Since then, I have been like this. I cannot sleep, I cannot eat." I know what it's like to have asthma, so I'm very sympathetic. "Come on, come on!" says Bins. "Write to this man – see, I can find his blog online – it's easy and you can pay with your credit card." Bins refuses to use the Internet for financial transactions because he fears becoming a target for the CIA, KGB and Wikileaks. I, on the other hand, having lost my soul many years ago, am very useful for buying things online.

"I won't do anything until you explain about the hookworms!" I say. Bins gets a pained expression on his face. "Pooh!" he says. "Don't you ever listen to Radio Lab?" It's a great programme but I had missed it this week. "They talked to this British guy, this Jasper. He used to have life-threatening asthma, and now he does not." Because of hookworms. He cured himself by flying to the African country of Cameroon, where he walked around barefoot in the open-air latrines until he was fairly sure of being infected.

Jiggs emits soprano wheezes at the very thought. "You're making this up," I tell Bins. But when I look it up, sure enough, the story is all true. The therapy works against other auto-immune conditions such as Crohn's and multiple-sclerosis as well, according to Lawrence. For those who want to know more there are easy-to-find links to the Radio Lab broadcast, Lawrence's blog and an article in Guardian. Unfortunately, the simple, low-cost, procedure is NOT approved by medical science. "So we can't buy the worms any more," I say to Jiggs. "But cheer up! My anti-histamines will probably work just as well," as I hand him a strip.

Manjula Padmanabhan, author and artist, writes of her life in the fictional town of Elsewhere in this weekly column

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