PROGRAMS END EVENTS

Four African Countries Receive the 2008 Carter Center Awards for Guinea Worm Eradication

Date: April 2, 2008
Venue: Abuja

Carter Center Award winners (Burkina Faso, Cote D'Ivoire, Ethopia and Togo) pose in a group photo with President Cater and wife Rosalynn. | Full size

Four countries - Burkina Faso, Cote D'Ivoire, Ethiopia and Togo received the Carter Center Awards for Guinea Worm eradication on April 2 at the Abuja Sheraton. The countries were honored for ending the transmission of Guinea Worm disease in 2007.  The four countries join Benin, Mauritania, Uganda, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Chad, India, Kenya, Pakistan, Senegal, and Yemen in reaching this major milestone. 

Nigeria received special mention for nearly eliminating Guinea Worm last year, with participants predicting it would achieve that milestone this year.

President Jimmy Carter, former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, Dr. Donald Hopkins, Vice President for Health Program at the Carter Center, and Dr. Ernesto Ruiz-Tiben, Director for the Carter Center Guinea Worm Eradication Program, presented the awards.  President Amadou Toumani Toure of Mali also received a special award for spear-heading a Guinea Worm eradication crusade within the Francophone countries of Africa.

Guinea worm is a debilitating parasite disease that causes severe pain and economic hardship that once plagued millions of poverty-stricken peasant people in Africa and Asia.  The disease is contracted when people consume water contaminated with infected larvae.  After a year, the one-meter-long worm slowly emerges from the body through an agonizing painful blister created on the skin.  Children suffering from the disease cannot attend school because they, like other victims, are incapacitated for an average of two months after a worm has begun to emerge.  Communities suffer food shortages when their residents are unable to farm. 

The Carter Center's global campaign to eradicate the disease has reduced the number of cases worldwide by more than 99 percent from an estimated 3.5 million in 1986 to fewer than 10,000 cases in 2007. 

Today, only five countries - Nigeria (with 73 cases), Niger (11 cases), Sudan, Ghana, and Mali are yet to completely eradicate the disease.  Ghana and Sudan now report 96 percent of the world's remaining cases. 

For Nigeria, President Carter noted that the count down is ticking to zero as the leadership efforts of people like former Head of State General Yakubu Gowon and other health workers have helped bring down reported cases from 653,000 in 1989 to a little less than 32 in 2008.

In a press conference shortly after the award presentation, President Carter said the achievements celebrated at the award ceremony were "results from the diligence of government officials, the dedicated efforts of health workers and volunteers, and the vigilance of villagers to contain every case." He added that with the historic success of the Guinea worm campaign this year “comes my renewed hope that Rosalynn and I will see this horrible affliction relegated to the history books within our lifetimes."

The Carter Center Guinea Worm Eradication Program started in 1986 by assisting Pakistan with efforts to eradicate the disease, and today, the Center spear-heads the international Guinea worm eradication campaign with the Center for Diseases Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, national ministries of Health, and many other partners.