The Second Disease Ever Eradicated

For the past 30 years, Jimmy Carter has waged war on the Guinea worm, a parasite that infects people who drink water contaminated with its larvae. Carter’s first encounter with the worm was in the late 1980s during a trip to a small village in Ghana, where more than two-thirds of inhabitants were infected. “I saw a young woman holding a baby in her arms … But it was not a baby—It was her right breast,” he said to a group of reporters. “It was [swollen to] about a foot long.

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