Interview with President Jimmy Carter: Guinea Worm Disease

This episode, the first in a five-part interview series with former President Jimmy Carter, details the Carter Center's work on the eradication of Guinea worm disease.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class from how
Stuff Works dot com. In celebration of the reopening of
the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum and the former
president's eighty five birthday, we sat down with Nobel Laureate
Jimmy Carter to talk about the highlights of his presidency

(00:22):
and his hopes for the Carter Center. Well, thank you
so much for the opportunity to speak with you today.
Were so excited to ask you many questions because you've
been so active in your post presidency and there's so
many things we want to know. But the one where
most curious about is your work with guinea worm disease.

(00:42):
And we know that this remarkable project is the effort
to eradicate it, and we're wondering why you picked that
as a cause. The Carter Center is basically premises to
deal with things that no one else wants to touch. Oh,
that are so difficult that nobody thinks that can be
succeed usful and guinea worm challenge fulfill Both those were crammins.

(01:06):
We found guinea worm and twenty three thousand, six hundred
of the most isolated villages on Earth. They didn't have
any aspect of running water and no wells, but just
got their drinking water out of what we would call
a mudhole that filled up in the rainy season and
then dried out. And within that stagnant water, the guinea

(01:28):
worm eggs breed and when people drink the water, which
they have to do they don't have any other source,
their egg goes into the human body and twelve months
later it evolves into a worm about thirty long, and
it stings inside of the epidermis of skin. It makes

(01:48):
a horrendous sol that's so beauty. It destroys muscles and
as the guinea worm egg emerges the female, if the
people wade out into the water to get another drink
of water or to ease the pain, then the guinea
worm lays hundreds of thousands of new eggs. So that's
the process. And we have been in all twenty three

(02:10):
thousand six d villages and I think twenty one nations,
three in Asia and the rest of them in Africa
to teach the local villages what causes the disease and
how to prevent its its repetition. Luckily, guinea worm has
to go through the human body each year. It can't

(02:32):
be survived by going through goats or cattle or sheep,
has to go through human body. So if we can
teach the humans how to interrupt that cycle by never
waiting out into the water when you have guinea worm
coming out of your body, or by filtering the water
through a very fine, permanent nation filter cloth, then if

(02:56):
they do that for a whole year in an entire village,
than guinea worm it's gone forever. So we hope and
expect that we'll soon have guinea worm completely eradicated from
the face of the earth. I had a report yesterday
and they've only found uses of guinea worm in all

(03:18):
the world, uh compared to three point six million cases
when we first started. So now we know every case
of guinea worm that exists, and we are trying very
hard to contain those cases and to make sure that
the people that have guinea worm don't spread it on
for the next generation. And I'm wondering, because guinea worm

(03:41):
is mentioned in ancient texts and even the Bible, It's
obviously been around for quite a long time. Why did
it take so long for someone to take us up
as a cause. I think that it's only been in
the last i'd say thirty years that people have known
for sure what cause guinea worm. The cycle of the
that I've already described, and also the people that have

(04:05):
getting worm were so widely scattered quite uphen there are
in tiny little villages at the end of a road
or in the betrayal, and the only way you get
there is by walking down a narrow trail. So it
was just an almost insurmountable problem to go to every
village in a country and make sure you had of

(04:26):
the people acquainted with how to get rid of it.
But we decided to undertake that, and we've had a
lot of help, of course along the way, uh, and
we've now been successful. Sometimes it was not easy in
the village because the the witch doctors i'll say, made
a living treating getting worm cases and they didn't want

(04:49):
their living interrupted by having getting worm eradicated. And then
they would tell the chief of the village that the
courter center was just lying to the folks that it
wasn't the fault of that beautiful little pond where they
got the water. If it hadn't been for the pond,
the village wouldn't have been there. The ancestors wouldn't have lived,

(05:09):
and so they looked upon the village pond whether the
guinea worm came from, as sacred, and we were violating,
you know, their religious beliefs by going in and heppen.
But so we've had overcome those kind of impediments, and
sometimes the guinea worm has existed in places in the
country that had a civil war. Going home or sometimes

(05:31):
no mads would go from one village to another during
the agricultural season and we could eliminate the guinea worm
in one village, and then new agricultural workers would come
in and had guinea worm, and they would wait out
in this into the water and started all over again.
So we've had to overcome all those kind of problems,
but we've done it successfully. Be short. Tune in every

(05:52):
Wednesday in September for more of our interview with President Carter.
To learn more about the Carter Center and its mission
of waging peace by getting disease and building help, visit
www dot Carter Center dot org and, as always, for
moral miss and thousands of other topics, visit how staff
works dot com.