‘Dracunculus Medinensis’ and the story of Jimmy Carter

The flags are still flying at half-mast. A few days ago, a great man was buried at a private ceremony in Georgia, USA, following a State Funeral at the National Cathedral in Washington that was attended by the five living Presidents of America, and watched live by people from all over the world.

For a Nigerian perspective, it is best to start the story of Jimmy Carter by telling the story of a tropical worm named Dracunculus Medinensis, which is also known as the Guinea Worm.

“His expressed last wish was to see the last Guinea Worm dead before his own death.”

It is a parasitic nematode that infects human beings and domestic animals. The medium of infection is contaminated drinking water.
Anybody who has seen a person with guinea worm will never forget the experience.

There are scenes from your clinical education as a medical student that stay with you to this day. You, for instance, will never forget the man with full-blown rabies who was ‘demonstrated’ to you at an outpatient clinic at UCH. The man had faint Ibadan scarifications on his cheeks and wore the look of terror of a man who knew death was imminent. His mouth opened in a barking sound and his body jerked forward. Instinctively your little clutch of medical students stepped back. That seemed to pain the man.

‘I won’t hurt you,’ he said, breathing with difficulty.

You encountered guinea worm on rural posting at Igbo Ora. The sight of the patient’s bulbous foot with a long worm protruding through an ulcer below the knee has never gone away from your mind.

Guinea worm is one of the diseases regarded as ‘Neglected Tropical Diseases’. It is the largest tissue parasite affecting human beings. It also affects animals. After infection, a painful blister forms on the leg. The blister bursts and the white-coloured worm peeps out from the ulcer when it is placed in cool water. Fever, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea and dizziness may follow. The leg swells up. The condition is disfiguring and debilitating and makes normal life almost impossible.

In 1986, there were an estimated 3.5 million cases of the disease in 20 endemic nations in Asia and Africa, including, of course, Nigeria. By 2023, the incidence was reduced by 99.9 percent—to a mere 14 cases, limited to six countries: South Sudan, Chad, Mali, Ethiopia, Angola, and the Central African Republic. Significantly, Nigeria no longer has any reported case of Guinea Worm.

The credit for this salutary development in Public Health should be laid squarely at the door of Jimmy Carter, who has just died at the age of 100 years—the longest-lived president in the history of the United States of America. His Carter Centre not only provided massive sponsorship for the war against the worm; he and his wife spent time in rural Africa, including Nigeria, personally participating in the deworming programme.

Carter, in his last years, suffered cancer of the skin which spread to his brain. His expressed last wish was to see the last Guinea Worm dead before his own death.

Read also: Jimmy Carter: more than just the “humble President”

It should be clear by now why a celebration of the life of Jimmy Carter should start with the celebration of the death of Guinea Worm in Nigeria.

James Earl Carter Junior was born in 1924 in Plains, Georgia, a descendant of English immigrants who settled in the Colony of Virginia in 1635. He was an enterprising youth, and from early, he was given his own acre of farmland, where he grew and sold peanuts. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from the Naval Academy in 1946, the same year he met and married Rosalynn, his wife. They would live together until her death in November 2023.

James served in the Navy from 1946 to 1953. He served on the Georgia Senate, and later became Governor of Georgia. On January 20, 1977, he was elected as the 39th President of the USA, on the ticket of the Democratic Party.

His presidency was marked by economic difficulties at home and international conflicts, which he struggled with. Significantly, he organised the signing of the Camp David Accords—a peace treaty between Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel and President Anwar Sadat of Egypt that changed the face of the Middle East, and for which both signatories were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

He gave back the Panama Canal to Panama in a show of international mutual respect and equity. He signed a Nuclear Arms Reduction Treaty with the Soviet Union.

In the eyes of many historians, his legacy was undone in the final year of his presidency by the Iran Hostage Crisis. A newly empowered Islamic Republic of Iran, disrespecting all international norms, seized hostages in the American embassy. Carter’s clumsy effort to show strength by sending the military to rescue the hostages proved a fiasco and an embarrassment to the USA.

He lost the next election to Ronald Reagan.

Carter, an Evangelical Baptist, seemed to truly come into his own after leaving the White House. He formed the Carter Centre. He lived an exemplary, frugal life with Rosalynn. He threw himself and all his resources into good causes, including building houses for poor people all over the world, fighting Guinea Worm and other tropical diseases, and helping to foster democratic processes in African countries by serving as an election monitor. He continued his life-long fight against racial discrimination and for the advancement of African Americans at home.

The common narrative that he was a mediocre president who became a great former president is not entirely correct. The Camp David Accords he engineered remain till today the only positive and meaningful American intervention in the Middle East, despite the blustering of Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump and despite the timorous ineptitude and hopelessly ambivalent exertions of the outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden.

A great man. A great force for moral goodness in a world sadly lacking in genuine heroes. May the soul of James Earl Carter Jnr rest in perfect peace.