When Jimmy Carter left office one of his big goals was eradicating this terrible disease,
guinea worm.
"Yeah, I'd like for the last guinea worm to die before I do."
And it looks like we're really close to making that happen. His foundation, in 1986, started
a campaign to kill off this really horrific parasitic disease.
Over the span of 30 years we've gone from
an estimated 3.5 million cases to 22 reported
cases in 2015.
"We hope and expect that within a year or two there will be no more guinea worm, anywhere."
That's happened without a vaccine, it's happened without a new drug, it was an incredible public
health success.
The guinea worm is a really devastating parasite that is contracted when people consume bad
drinking water.
The worm can grow to about a meter or so, about 3 feet long. They don't know that this
worm is growing inside of them. The real obvious symptom is when the worm breaks through the
skin and starts coming out.
"The only treatment is wrapping the worm around a stick and pulling it out - inch by inch
- every day, for weeks."
There's no drugs there's no vaccines. You can't work, you can't go to school. It's quite
painful. And when people are in pain with this worm coming out of their body, they'll
sometimes go to a local lake or water source, put their foot in it. That releases more larvae
into the water, people drink the water, they consume the larvae. The larvae mate with each
other and the whole cycle just starts again.
Without drugs or vaccines, the Carter foundation was tasked with coming up with affordable
ways of preventing the disease.
One strategy was keeping infected people away from the water source. They employed elderly
African men in the villages where they were having these outbreaks to kind of be water
source guards. Another one was encouraging people to filter their water. So providing
filter material that are necessary to get the larvae out of the water. The other thing
they would do is very closely monitor where outbreaks are happening and really control
an outbreak before it gets to big.
Seeing an incredibly pervasive disease shrink from 3.5 million cases to only 22 in a lifetime
is incredibly remarkable.
The list of eradicated diseases very short, it's basically smallpox. We've never eradicated
a parasitic disease before. So, if we do that, this is really unprecedented and it leaves
him with this remarkable public health legacy.