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- 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. And coming out of the nipple of her breast was a Guinea worm.” Carter would later discover that the woman had 11 worms in her body. This event, which he called one of the most unforgettable scenes of human suffering he had ever seen, inspired him to create a new mission for his Carter Center foundation: The complete eradication of Guinea worm disease.