Does Mass Deworming Affect Child Nutrition? Meta-analysis, Cost-Effectiveness, and Statistical Power

Michael Kremer, Edward Miguel, Kevin Croke, Joan Hamory Hicks and Eric Hsu

No 11458, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: The WHO has recently debated whether to reaffirm its long-standing recommendation of mass drug administration (MDA) in areas with more than 20% prevalence of soil-transmitted helminths (hookworm, whipworm, and roundworm). There is consensus that the relevant deworming drugs are safe and effective, so the key question facing policymakers is whether the expected benefits of MDA exceed the roughly $0.30 per treatment cost. The literature on long run educational and economic impacts of deworming suggests that this is the case. However, a recent meta-analysis by Taylor-Robinson et al. (2015) (hereafter TMSDG), disputes these findings. The authors conclude that while treatment of children known to be infected increases weight by 0.75 kg (95% CI: 0.24, 1.26; p=0.0038), there is substantial evidence that MDA has no impact on weight or other child outcomes. We update the TMSDG analysis by including studies omitted from that analysis and extracting additional data from included studies, such as deriving standard errors from p-values when the standard errors are not reported in the original article. The updated sample includes twice as many trials as analyzed by TMSDG, substantially improving statistical power. We find that the TMSDG analysis is underpowered: it would conclude that MDA has no effect even if the true effect were (1) large enough to be cost-effective relative to other interventions in similar populations, or (2) of a size that is consistent with results from studies of children known to be infected. The hypothesis of a common zero effect of multiple-dose MDA deworming on child weight at longest follow-up is rejected at the 10% level using the TMSDG dataset, and with a p-value

Keywords: Meta-analysis; Worms; Weight gain (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C49 I15 I18 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-hea and nep-ltv
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

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Working Paper: Does mass deworming affect child nutrition ? meta-analysis, cost-effectiveness, and statistical power (2016)
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