Former President Jimmy Carter spent most of his post-presidency career fighting a vicious parasite known as the Guinea worm. By his death in late 2024, cases of the disease had fallen from 3.5 million a year to just 14. Photo by The Carter Center.

News Release

ATLANTA — Nearly a year after leaving the White House, Jimmy Carter founded the Carter Center in 1982, with a mission to “(alleviate) human suffering.” His commitment to this goal was proven in a post-presidency full of philanthropic work.

One of Carter’s largest efforts was his help in the near-extinction of Guinea worm, a vicious parasite from Africa and Asia that infects its victims through drinking stagnant water.

While suffering from cancer in 2015, Carter joker to reporters he’d “like for the last Guinea worm to die before I do.” At his death Sunday, Dec 29, 2024, at 100 years old, the former president had come incredibly close to achieving his wish. Now, experts say the worm’s total eradication is closer than ever.

When The Carter Center began addressing the parasite in 1986, Guinea worms affected 3.5 million people in 21 countries in Africa and Asia every year. That number has been reduced to just 14 known human cases in 2023, according to the Carter Center.

Symptoms of Guinea worm infection, caused by consuming the parasite, might not appear for up to a year after infection. But once they manifest, a pregnant worm, which can grow up to three feet long, begins to break through its host’s skin. The process is extremely painful for the infected human, as the worm slowly emerges out, usually through legs or feet.

Although Guinea worm disease is not fatal, entire villages can be affected via shared water sources. The worm’s emergence causes severe stinging and burning sensations, encouraging its victims to seek relief by dipping the affected area into a body of water. There, it releases the new larvae, which are consumed by humans when they drink the infected water.

Carter’s empathy for those suffering from the Guinea worm was in part informed by his background growing up in a farmhouse without the conveniences of running water or electricity. He knew how parasites could cripple communities by preventing farmers from farming, children from attending school and mothers from tending to their children.

Human’s bodies cannot naturally resist the worms, and the process of removing them is excruciating: pulling one slowly out with a stick, by mere centimeters every day. The process can last weeks, and pulling the worm out too fast can cause it to painfully break inside the body, which causes swelling and infection. The work compounds when multiple worms infect a human, as with Abdullahi Rabiu, a Nigerian man infected with 84 worms at once.

According to the Carter Center, the Guinea worm’s eradication would mark the first disease eradicated without medicine or a vaccine, the first parasite eradicated, and the second disease to be eradicated by mankind, after smallpox.

Because the disease has no treatments, the Center, along with organizations and governments around the world, cannot fight it with medicine. Instead, relief must be provided through education and prevention.

Carter Center workers give villagers cloth screens to filter larvae from their water. They isolate contaminated bodies of water and keep infected from seeking relief in water. Villagers are encouraged to identify and report new cases.

Though human cases have reached historical lows, infected dogs complicate complete elimination. Still, by 2030 the WHO aims to eradicate the Guinea worm, and The Carter Center is confident the parasite will face extinction sooner still.

Even as he went into hospice care, Carter continued asking for updates on the fight against the disease. He had remained all his life committed to alleviating suffering.