The Parasite Scandal: The Infections America Stopped Looking For
In 1909 this country decided intestinal parasites were a national emergency, and acted like one.
The Rockefeller Sanitary Commission surveyed 600 southern counties, found hookworm in 40% of the children it examined, and estimated 7.5 million infected Southerners. Then it did what we would now find unimaginable: it sent traveling dispensaries into those counties, treated people on the spot, and taught local physicians what to look for.
A century later, in 2014, the CDC published a statement about parasitic infections occurring inside the United States, and gave the category an official name.
They called them "neglected".
Not rare. Not eradicated. Not foreign. Neglected. The word concedes that somebody stopped paying attention, and the document goes on to describe exactly that. And in the CDC's own words, doctors are "often unfamiliar" with these infections and "may not diagnose or treat appropriately."
More than 80 million Americans carry one of the two most common, and most never know. Roughly 1 in 4 of us.
Toxoplasma accounts for more than 40 million of them. Pinworm, the most common worm infection in the country, accounts for an estimated 40 million more.
That is the scandal in two dates. Nobody banned the test. Nobody buried a study. We quit, and the quitting was never announced.
Same country. Same infections. One century apart. The first time we went looking. The second time we gave it a name that means we stopped.
Until today.
You Think This Is a Third World Problem?
So did I. Here is the study that took the idea away from me.
In 2018 a team pooled 109 studies from 40 countries and examined 42,797 soil samples from beaches, parks and playgrounds, looking for the eggs of Toxocara, the roundworm carried by dogs and cats. It is one of the infections on the CDC's neglected list.
This is what public ground looks like around the world:
- Across Africa, 27% of sampled public places carried the eggs.
- Globally, 21%.
- Across North and Central America, 13%.
Thirteen percent. That is the number that lets you keep believing this is somebody else's problem.
Then, in 2020, a study sampled public playgrounds in New York City. It was published in a journal called "Neglected Tropical Diseases":
- In Manhattan, 29.6% of sampled playgrounds carried Toxocara eggs.
- In the Bronx, 66.7% did.
- And in the Bronx, more than 70% of the eggs recovered were embryonated, which is the stage at which an egg can infect a person.
A journal with the word "Tropical" in its name published a study about New York City playgrounds. The Bronx came back at 66.7%, higher than the pooled figure for any region on earth.
Manhattan alone, at 29.6%, came in above the African average. Not a village without plumbing. Manhattan.
The hotspot is in New York, not in the country you were picturing. Parasites are not a matter of latitude or of national character. They come down to whether anything gets between a contaminated surface and a child's hands, and whether anyone is looking afterward.
The Warning Signs
Everything above happened to strangers. This part is you.
These are the flags clinicians screen on. Count them:
- Diarrhea that comes and goes with no clear cause. This is the single most sensitive indicator.
- Belly pain that arrives and passes.
- Appetite that dropped without you deciding to eat less.
- Itching around the anus at night. That one is specific to pinworm.
- A raised eosinophil count on routine bloodwork, the marker worms leave behind.
- Fatigue that sleep does not fix.
- Bloating after meals you used to tolerate.
- Iron running low with no explanation anyone has given you.
I am not telling you that you have a parasite. Most people with two or three of these have something else entirely, and the ordinary explanation is usually the right one.
I am telling you nobody is going to ask. If you counted three or more, ask your doctor for a stool test, three samples on three separate days, and say the word out loud in the room.
"But I Would Know If I Had One"
That is what I thought too. It is the fairest objection on this page.
The stool test only finds what it goes looking for, and only if a physician orders it. The protocol calls for three samples on three separate days, because a single sample misses a great deal. Most people who get tested at all give one. Pinworm is not caught by stool testing at all; it needs a tape test taken first thing in the morning.
So one clear sample gets recorded as a negative and the chart says no parasite. Nobody did anything wrong and nobody lied to you. The test answered the narrow question it was asked, and nobody asked again.
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One seed has followed this problem for two thousand years. Dioscorides, the Greek army doctor whose herbal guided medicine across Europe and the Islamic world for the next fifteen hundred years, catalogued it for driving out worms. Physicians from Morocco to India kept using it the whole time.
That is history, not a medical promise. But it is history worth investigating.
Introducing Black Forest Ethiopian Black Seed Oil
When I started digging into this I was looking for somebody to blame. A buried study, a killed program, a lobbyist. I did not find one, and what I found instead is worse, because it needs nobody's cooperation: no rule was ever broken, because there was barely a rule to break.
So let me be plain about what this is not. I am not selling you a cleanse. No supplement treats a parasitic infection, and if a company tells you theirs does, close the tab. If any of the above sounded like you, ask your doctor to test you for it, three samples.
What I can do is the one thing almost nobody in this category does.
A dual-source formula built on cold-pressed Ethiopian black seed oil, standardised to a declared amount of the one compound the research is about.
Every milligram is on the label: no proprietary blends, no fillers, no bitter aftertaste.
Per serving, two softgels:
- 1,000 mg cold-pressed black seed oil (Nigella sativa), Ethiopian and Egyptian.
- 30 mg thymoquinone, declared per serving.
- 5 mg black pepper extract, standardized to 95% piperine
- 60 softgels, 30 servings, two per serving.
- 900 mg of thymoquinone per bottle, printed on the front.
We built it because the version we wanted to buy did not exist. Not a stronger bottle than everyone else's. A bottle whose contents you can confirm, in a form you will still be taking in month four.
What Is Thymoquinone?
In 1963, in Cairo, a chemist named Mahmoud El-Dakhakhny isolated a bright yellow crystalline compound from Egyptian black seed oil and named it thymoquinone. Nearly every study you will ever read about this seed is, underneath, a study about that compound.
Two things about it decide everything that follows:
- It is fragile. Heat degrades it, light degrades it, and time degrades it even in a sealed bottle.
- And it is wildly inconsistent between products. A 2022 screening of eleven commercial black seed products found thymoquinone running from 3.08 to 809.4 mg per 100 g, a 99.6% spread. The same seed was named on every front label.
What it does to a parasite in a laboratory dish:
Put thymoquinone in a dish beside one of these organisms and it goes after the parasite's own defences. It floods the parasite with unstable oxygen molecules, the same corrosive chemistry that rusts metal, and drains the reserve that organism keeps on hand to neutralize them.
What it does to a worm:
The same corrosion eats the tegument, the outer skin a worm uses both to absorb its food and to defend itself. Researchers have watched that surface break down under a microscope, with the internal organs failing after it.
Researchers have run that test on five different parasites. Each time, they counted how many were dead afterwards:
- The amoeba behind dysentery. 85.5% dead within a day. 96.8% within three. (Entamoeba histolytica, Pharmacognosy Journal)
- Giardia, the bug you pick up from bad water. 82.8% within a day, 96.6% within three.
- Blastocystis. Every single organism in the sample stopped inside 24 hours.
- Toxoplasma, while it was actively dividing. Up to 70.8% self-destructed, and more of them died as the dose went up. (Iranian Journal of Enteric Pathogens)
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A liver fluke. Its outer skin broke down and its proteins corroded. (Fasciola gigantica, PLOS One, 2017)
The same activity has been reported against Leishmania, Encephalitozoon, the cattle blood parasites, and a second liver fluke.
What Is Ethiopian Cold-Pressed Black Seed Oil?
1. Ethiopian.
Black cumin grows across Egypt, Syria, Turkey, India and the Ethiopian highlands, and it does not make the same oil everywhere. A 2024 study compared three origins head to head, measuring thymoquinone within the essential oil fraction:
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- Ethiopian highest at 34.84%,
- Egyptian second at 27.36%,
- and Syrian last at 22.59%.
Highland conditions push the plant to make more of its defensive compounds. Our oil is drawn from the top two.
That is a share of the volatile fraction, not of the bottle. And origin is a starting hand, not a guarantee: some Ethiopian regions yield less, and a bad press undoes a good harvest. Which is why we test the finished bottle instead of printing a flag on the label and calling it proof.
2. Cold-pressed.
Pressing is mechanical: crush the seed, the oil comes out. Do it fast and friction makes heat; add heat deliberately and you get more oil per ton, which is what a buyer paying by volume wants. Thymoquinone tolerates heat least well of anything in there. So the cheapest way to press this seed is the most efficient way to destroy the reason anyone wanted it.
What the whole oil has done in animals:
In mice infected with Schistosoma mansoni, black seed oil reduced total worm burden by 45% to 57%, with egg counts falling alongside it, and part of the effect ran through the animal's own immune response rather than the oil acting alone.
In naturally infected mice carrying Hymenolepis nana and Aspiculuris tetraptera, the mouse pinworm, black seed oil cleared the parasites in a dose-dependent way: at the highest concentration none survived past the fourth day, and even at the lowest, none survived past the thirteenth.
Then there is what gets added afterward. A 2022 bulletin from the Botanical Adulterants Prevention Program, devoted to this one crop, names the oils used to cut black seed oil: palm, corn, sunflower, soybean and canola. They cost roughly 3% to 10% of what the real thing costs, which the bulletin names outright as the motivation. Some products on sale, it reports, contain no black seed at all.
What Is the Black Pepper Extract For?
Five milligrams, standardized to 95% piperine, which is the active alkaloid in black pepper. It is the smallest thing on the label and it needs the most honesty.
Piperine slows down how fast your body throws things away. Your gut and liver run enzyme systems whose job is to tag arriving compounds for disposal, and piperine jams several of them, so what arrived stays in circulation longer.
In a 1998 human study, 20 mg of piperine raised serum curcumin by 2,000% (Shoba et al., Planta Medica).
It also has its own record against parasites in a dish: black pepper fractions killed Leishmania donovani in both life stages, and stopped the larvae of Caenorhabditis elegans, the roundworm laboratories use as their standard test animal.
Five milligrams is a small amount of anything. It is in there for both reasons.
Why a Softgel and Not a Spoon
There are three ways to buy this seed and they are not interchangeable. This is the part of the aisle nobody explains.
- A bottle of oil you take by spoon: You get the real cold-pressed oil. You also get the strong taste.
- A dry capsule of ground seed: A different product wearing a similar label. Thymoquinone lives in the oil, and a hard capsule of milled seed powder is not cold-pressed oil. It is the seed, ground, with its oil exposed to air from the moment it was milled.
- A softgel: A softgel exists to hold a liquid, which is the only reason it can carry cold-pressed oil at all.
So if what you want is the pressed oil, your real choice is a spoon or a softgel. We did not pick the softgel for convenience. It is the only format that puts cold-pressed oil in your hand without a spoon in it.
Straight black seed oil tastes aggressive. Bitter and peppery going down, and it tends to come back on you for a while afterward. In a tolerability study of 70 healthy adults given black cumin oil for nine days, altered taste was among the reported effects.
That sounds minor. It is the whole ballgame: the most common reason people quit is not disappointment, it is that they could not face the spoon on day nine.
And an opened bottle you are avoiding is also an oxidizing bottle. A 2023 storage study followed cold-pressed black cumin oil for four months and watched its acidity climb from 10.26% to 16.96%, refrigerated the whole time. Your kitchen is not 4 degrees Celsius.
A softgel is one dose, sealed from air until you swallow it. The bottle behind it is not slowly turning while you work up to the next spoonful.
What's in the Bottle, and How We Tested It
Every bottle we sell is tested after it is filled, not before.
That difference is not a marketing preference. Under the federal manufacturing rules for supplements, 21 CFR 111.75, a maker has to verify that finished batches meet its specifications for identity, purity, strength and composition; and potency verification applies specifically where a label claim is made.
The obligation attaches to the claim. Print a number and you are required to test for it on the finished product. Print nothing and there is nothing to verify.
That is why most black seed labels carry no thymoquinone figure at all. Silence is cheaper than a specification.
We printed 30 mg, which puts us on the hook for it, measured by HPLC on the finished batch — the same method the 2022 screening used to find that 99.6% spread. Same test, run on us.
We confirm the seed is what our supplier says it is. We measure the thymoquinone, and what is on the label is what is in the bottle.
The Mission
Dioscorides, a Greek physician who served as an army doctor under Nero, catalogued this seed two thousand years ago and listed it for expelling worms.
The book he recorded it in stayed the standard medical reference across Europe and the Middle-Eastern world for the next fifteen hundred years, and physicians kept using the seed the whole time. El-Dakhakhny found the compound in 1963. And in 2026 you can walk into a store, buy a bottle with that seed's name on the front if you can find it, and have no way at all to find out whether the compound is in there.
We built for that gap.
1,000 mg cold-pressed black seed oil (Nigella sativa), Ethiopian and Egyptian with 30 mg thymoquinone per serving.
A number on the label with the paperwork behind it, which ought to be the floor of this industry rather than something a brand gets to advertise.
Nobody was required to look for the parasite or measure the oil. Both times the test already existed, and no rule compelled a single person to run it.
Nobody is coming to change that. There is no rule in America being drafted, no agency about to require it.
It changes when enough of us decide it is time to fight back.
Be the First
It opens next week. The founding list goes first, and that list closes the same day the door opens.
There is one more thing before then.
This Friday we are running a single event, for one day only. It is not just for this product, and I am not going to explain it here. What I will tell you is that the list hears about it first, and that what you do during that one day decides what you pay when this door finally opens.
Miss it and you can still buy on launch day. You will just pay launch-day price like everyone else.
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This decides who goes first, and who hears about Friday.
Antonio Colmenares
CEO, Black Forest Supplements
