Ex US president Carter to visit west Africa over Guinea worm problem
ACCRA, Jan 26 (AFP) — Former US president Jimmy Carter will next week visit west Africa to help raise international awareness of Guinea worm disease, a statement released by the Carter Center said.
Carter and his wife Rosalynn will arrive February 2 in the Togolese capital Lome before travelling to Mali and then Ghana, where they will be joined by World Health Organization (WHO) director, Lee Jong-Wook, and Kul Gautam, the deputy director of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
Guinea worm, or Dracunculiasis to give it its scientific name, is a parasitic disease contracted when people consume water that is contaminated by water fleas carrying infective larvae.
Once inside the body, the stomach acid digests the water flea, but not the Guinea worm, which can during the next year grow up to a meter-long (three feet) inside the abdomen, eventually emerging through painful blisters in the skin, normally on lower limbs.
“Guinea worm disease is unfamiliar, even unimaginable to most people in the developed world,” Carter said in a statement released by his not-for-profit Carter Center.
“Relieving the suffering caused by Guinea worm is as easy as educating people about the disease and providing them with simple solutions to make their drinking water safe.”
Since 1986, when an estimated 3.5 million people were infected, a campaign run by the Carter Center, UNICEF, WHO and the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has largely eliminated the disease, but it still occurs in 13 countries, all in Africa.
More than half the 35,000 cases remaining worldwide are reported from southern Sudan, according to the CDC. Efforts to eradicate the disease in Sudan have been hampered by the long-running civil war.
Ghana is among six west African states, along with Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Niger, Nigeria and Togo, where more than 1,000 cases are reported each year, according to CDC.
Smaller numbers of cases are reported in Benin, Mali, and Mauritania in west Africa; Chad in central Africa; and Ethiopia and Uganda in east Africa.