Intestinal worms in Vietnam: info needed

[huy.duong@ctsu.ox.ac.uk]

Dear friends,

2 billions people in the world are affected by intestinal worms.
In children, the worms worsen malnutrition (suy dinh du+o+~ng)
(in severe cases, they cause thie^'u ma'u. They also cause lack of sleep :))
and thereby possibly affecting physical and mental growth. Treatments
to kill the worms are cheap but they have to be applied repeatedly because 
re-infection rates are high. Also, with the infection rates prevalent in the 
developing world, it is cheaper and more convenient to give the treatment to
all the children than to test for worms before giving the treatment.  
  
The Child Development Institute in the UK is running a programme
to treat intestinal worms in children in some schools in Vietnam.
The schools give the treatment at regular intervals to all the students.
However, at the moment there is no measure of the benefit, and without
evidence of benfits it can be hard to persuade more schools to participate.
By coincidence, a few days after I asked Peto for help for Vietnam, the CDI
also asked him to help. His initial idea is to do a randomized trial:
pick some schools at random and give the treatment, pick some at random
and give placebo, then compare physical growth and mental achievement
for the two groups. 

Do you know of anything that can readily be used as a measure of mental 
achievement for school children in Vietnam? What national/nationally 
standardized tests are there? What are the tests and exams in Vietnam?

Huy