The Carter Center for decades has led a fight against Guinea worm disease around the world. This year, preliminary data indicates just 11 cases were recorded.
Only one human disease — smallpox — has been eradicated by human efforts. Guinea worm disease could become the second, though it may take years and new methods to push the effort across the finish line.
The disease, which is most often reported in rural, impoverished areas without clean drinking water, remains endemic in several African countries. People can be infected by multiple worms at a time — one man in Nigeria suffered as health workers removed more than 80 worms from his body in 1999.
Unlike smallpox, there is no vaccine or treatment to stop Guinea worm disease. So the Carter Center has worked with African and Asian health agencies to change how rural villagers live daily life by offering education about how the disease spreads and how to prevent it, providing water filters to those in need and using larvicides to control outbreaks.
By 2000, the disease had been eliminated from Southeast Asia.
“You need a champion like President Carter to say, ‘This is the flagship program of the Carter Center in health. We want this done,” said Dr. Jordan Tappero, the deputy director of neglected tropical diseases for the Gates Foundation, which has given funding to the Carter Center’s work.
Children in South Sudan collect drinking water from a pond using filters provided by the Carter Center’s guinea worm eradication program on Nov. 4, 2010.Maggie Fick / AP file
The World Health Organization’s goal is to eradicate Guinea worm disease by 2030. For that to happen, global cases have to remain at zero for three consecutive years.
This year’s preliminary case total of 11 represents a record low, but Tappero said more work lies ahead and new methods are likely required to achieve eradication.
Complicating the efforts are cases of Guinea worm disease detected in domestic animals. Guinea worm disease was first detected in dogs in 2012, forcing a shift in strategy.
“Infection in dogs and cats in these last countries makes it harder to get there by 2030,” Tappero said. “You can’t teach a dog to say this pond is safe to drink from, and that one’s not.”
Tappero said researchers are developing tools to immediately detect signs of the disease in water samples, working on diagnostic tests that could identify cases months before the parasite emerges and pursuing trials of a drug called Flubendazole for use in infected dogs.
In 2022, the Carter Center held a summit for some of the last countries fighting the disease. Angola, Cameroon, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Mali, South Sudan and Sudan all agreed to accelerate their efforts to eradicate Guinea worm.
“That kind of political will is so important — having that kind of high-level commitment coupled with at the village level. People just want to get this done,” Weiss said. The path Carter paved, he added, makes it “pretty straightforward now.”
Источник: www.nbcnews.com
