TDS Time Machine | President's Day
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What innovative methods did Jimmy Carter use to eradicate the Guinea Worm?
Nice to see you. So here you are. Here's what I didn't realize. Okay, so you have this thing that you start in 1986. Right. Carter Center goes and they say, this guinea worm is a problem. Explain very quickly what it is, because I can't do it justice.
Guinea worm, if you drink water out of a filthy water hole, which fills up during the rainy season and then stays dry, it doesn't have any fresh water. Then you drink the guinea worm eggs, and in a year's time, it grows to a worm about 30 inches long. And then it stings the inside of your skin, epidermis, and then it creates a sore, a big sore, and then it emerges. It takes you 30 days to come out, and it destroys muscle tissue and leaves you a cripple.
And terrible parts.
Oh, horrible pain, almost indescribable pain, yeah.
And this is, I have, they, a lot of times when a movie is coming out, they'll send me a little something like a Nerf ball with the name of the movie on it. Your people sent me a dead guinea worm. I bet it's dead, yeah. Can we get that over here? This is what it looks like. It looks like that is the thing that comes out of people's, oftentimes their feet, yes? Their feet or their toes? Feet, toes. The first time I saw it, one was coming out of a nipple of a woman's breast. Unbelievable. And just terribly, terribly painful. Now, in 1986... When you begin this program, how many cases of guinea worm are occurring throughout? Where did it mostly have, Asia, Africa?
Three countries in Asia and 17 countries in Africa, sub-Saharan Africa. We found guinea worm in 23,600 villages, and we had 3.5 million cases.
3.5 million cases. That's what we found. This year, now we are 1986 to now, is not going to do them.
542.
How did Jimmy Carter overcome local resistance to eradicate the Guinea Worm?
From 3.5 million. Right. And 521 of those cases were in South Sudan. This year, so far, we've just had seven cases. All of them in South Sudan. Unbelievable.
But here's the crazy part. So here's the thing. So we always think about, well, these types of scourges that hit these areas, and we have to develop the right medicine and the drug, or we have to create some sort of program. How was this solved?
No medicine will prevent it. No medicine will cure it. For 10,000s of years, they wrapped the guinea worm when it came out around a stick and put some tension on it so it would come out in 20 days instead of 30 days. So you had to suffer three weeks instead of four weeks. And so we found that if you pour the water through a filter cloth, the kind that won't rot in the tropics, and we provided that. Then it screens out the guinea worm eggs, and then you can drink your filthy water without the guinea worm eggs, and you don't have the guinea worm. So that's what we've done.
All of this was education. You went there, and they showed... Now, were they resistant to that type of... Yeah, some of them were. It's changing thousands of years of how they were doing this.
Some of them were, because the medicine men were making a lot of money treating it by putting it on a stick and twisting it. Sure. And also, they thought that the pond was sacred, If it hadn't been for the pond, their ancestors wouldn't live, their village wouldn't be there. So we were insinuating that the disease came out of our sacred pond. So then if you hold up the glass and have a magnifying glass, you can see the little things swimming around in there. So we convinced them that these were alien people, alien things in their pond, so they let us provide the filter cloths. But we had to go to every single village on Earth that had the disease.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What innovative methods did Jimmy Carter use to eradicate the Guinea Worm?
1:02–2:55
2
How did Jimmy Carter overcome local resistance to eradicate the Guinea Worm?
2:55–4:42
3
What is the impact of the Carter Center's work on neglected diseases?
4:42–8:00
4
How does the Clinton Global Initiative respond to global health crises?
8:00–26:12
Speakers
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