Nigeria: A Year Without Guinea Worms

Dec 16th, 2009 9:29 AM UTC
By Rena Pacheco-Theard

There have been a lot of successes in global health – could the elimination of Guinea worm worldwide be next?

After 12 consecutive months without a single worm detected, Nigeria is moving closer to the eradication of Guinea worm. Two more years are needed for the WHO to make it official, but it appears that Nigeria, once the worst-affected country (653,000 cases in 1989), is free of worms.

This progress, led by the Carter Center’s Guinea Worm Eradication Program, is being achieved without the assistance of a vaccine or medicine to treat or prevent Guinea worm. Preventative measures come in the form of health education and low-technology actions to influence behavior change, like filtering the fleas out of drinking water with fine-mesh filter cloths or pipe filters.

Guinea worm, dracunculiasis, is contracted by drinking pond water infested with microscopic fleas that harbor the worm larvae. The larvae grow for a year inside a person’s body, becoming worms up to three feet long, which exit the body through painful blisters in the skin.

Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali and Sudan are the only countries that still have the worms, down from 20 affected countries in 1986 when the Carter Center began its campaign against the disease.

Spurred on by the eradication of smallpox in 1977, the Carter Center’s International Task Force for Disease Eradication has identified seven diseases as potentially eradicable: dracunculiasis, poliomyelitis, mumps, rubella, lymphatic filariasis, cysticercosis, and measles. Nigeria’s success in combating Guinea worm offers hope for Guinea worm’s full eradication.

TAGS: Health, Policy News