Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. In celebration of the reopening of
Speaker 1: the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum and the former
Speaker 1: president's eighty five birthday, we sat down with Nobel Laureate
Speaker 1: Jimmy Carter to talk about the highlights of his presidency
Speaker 1: and his hopes for the Carter Center. Well, thank you
Speaker 1: so much for the opportunity to speak with you today.
Speaker 1: Were so excited to ask you many questions because you've
Speaker 1: been so active in your post presidency and there's so
Speaker 1: many things we want to know. But the one where
Speaker 1: most curious about is your work with guinea worm disease.
Speaker 1: And we know that this remarkable project is the effort
Speaker 1: to eradicate it, and we're wondering why you picked that
Speaker 1: as a cause. The Carter Center is basically premises to
Speaker 1: deal with things that no one else wants to touch. Oh,
Speaker 1: that are so difficult that nobody thinks that can be
Speaker 1: succeed usful and guinea worm challenge fulfill Both those were crammins.
Speaker 1: We found guinea worm and twenty three thousand, six hundred
Speaker 1: of the most isolated villages on Earth. They didn't have
Speaker 1: any aspect of running water and no wells, but just
Speaker 1: got their drinking water out of what we would call
Speaker 1: a mudhole that filled up in the rainy season and
Speaker 1: then dried out. And within that stagnant water, the guinea
Speaker 1: worm eggs breed and when people drink the water, which
Speaker 1: they have to do they don't have any other source,
Speaker 1: their egg goes into the human body and twelve months
Speaker 1: later it evolves into a worm about thirty long, and
Speaker 1: it stings inside of the epidermis of skin. It makes
Speaker 1: a horrendous sol that's so beauty. It destroys muscles and
Speaker 1: as the guinea worm egg emerges the female, if the
Speaker 1: people wade out into the water to get another drink
Speaker 1: of water or to ease the pain, then the guinea
Speaker 1: worm lays hundreds of thousands of new eggs. So that's
Speaker 1: the process. And we have been in all twenty three
Speaker 1: thousand six d villages and I think twenty one nations,
Speaker 1: three in Asia and the rest of them in Africa
Speaker 1: to teach the local villages what causes the disease and
Speaker 1: how to prevent its its repetition. Luckily, guinea worm has
Speaker 1: to go through the human body each year. It can't
Speaker 1: be survived by going through goats or cattle or sheep,
Speaker 1: has to go through human body. So if we can
Speaker 1: teach the humans how to interrupt that cycle by never
Speaker 1: waiting out into the water when you have guinea worm
Speaker 1: coming out of your body, or by filtering the water
Speaker 1: through a very fine, permanent nation filter cloth, then if
Speaker 1: they do that for a whole year in an entire village,
Speaker 1: than guinea worm it's gone forever. So we hope and
Speaker 1: expect that we'll soon have guinea worm completely eradicated from
Speaker 1: the face of the earth. I had a report yesterday
Speaker 1: and they've only found uses of guinea worm in all
Speaker 1: the world, uh compared to three point six million cases
Speaker 1: when we first started. So now we know every case
Speaker 1: of guinea worm that exists, and we are trying very
Speaker 1: hard to contain those cases and to make sure that
Speaker 1: the people that have guinea worm don't spread it on
Speaker 1: for the next generation. And I'm wondering, because guinea worm
Speaker 1: is mentioned in ancient texts and even the Bible, It's
Speaker 1: obviously been around for quite a long time. Why did
Speaker 1: it take so long for someone to take us up
Speaker 1: as a cause. I think that it's only been in
Speaker 1: the last i'd say thirty years that people have known
Speaker 1: for sure what cause guinea worm. The cycle of the
Speaker 1: that I've already described, and also the people that have
Speaker 1: getting worm were so widely scattered quite uphen there are
Speaker 1: in tiny little villages at the end of a road
Speaker 1: or in the betrayal, and the only way you get
Speaker 1: there is by walking down a narrow trail. So it
Speaker 1: was just an almost insurmountable problem to go to every
Speaker 1: village in a country and make sure you had of
Speaker 1: the people acquainted with how to get rid of it.
Speaker 1: But we decided to undertake that, and we've had a
Speaker 1: lot of help, of course along the way, uh, and
Speaker 1: we've now been successful. Sometimes it was not easy in
Speaker 1: the village because the the witch doctors i'll say, made
Speaker 1: a living treating getting worm cases and they didn't want
Speaker 1: their living interrupted by having getting worm eradicated. And then
Speaker 1: they would tell the chief of the village that the
Speaker 1: courter center was just lying to the folks that it
Speaker 1: wasn't the fault of that beautiful little pond where they
Speaker 1: got the water. If it hadn't been for the pond,
Speaker 1: the village wouldn't have been there. The ancestors wouldn't have lived,
Speaker 1: and so they looked upon the village pond whether the
Speaker 1: guinea worm came from, as sacred, and we were violating,
Speaker 1: you know, their religious beliefs by going in and heppen.
Speaker 1: But so we've had overcome those kind of impediments, and
Speaker 1: sometimes the guinea worm has existed in places in the
Speaker 1: country that had a civil war. Going home or sometimes
Speaker 1: no mads would go from one village to another during
Speaker 1: the agricultural season and we could eliminate the guinea worm
Speaker 1: in one village, and then new agricultural workers would come
Speaker 1: in and had guinea worm, and they would wait out
Speaker 1: in this into the water and started all over again.
Speaker 1: So we've had to overcome all those kind of problems,
Speaker 1: but we've done it successfully. Be short. Tune in every
Speaker 1: Wednesday in September for more of our interview with President Carter.
Speaker 1: To learn more about the Carter Center and its mission
Speaker 1: of waging peace by getting disease and building help, visit
Speaker 1: www dot Carter Center dot org and, as always, for
Speaker 1: moral miss and thousands of other topics, visit how staff
Speaker 1: works dot com.