'President Carter never stopped changing lives for the better.'
The 98-year-old former president has "decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family," the Carter Center said in a statement.In 2015, millions of people around the world tuned in to hear President Jimmy Carter announce that his cancer -- metastatic melanoma -- had spread to his brain, but he didn't focus solely on his own disease. Rather, he used the international attention to talk about an illness he did not have.
"We were traveling in a big motorcade," he said in 2017. "We were driving along, and elementary school children had a big sign that says, 'Watch out, Guinea worm. Here comes Jimmy Carter.' That was almost as good as a Nobel Prize for me." At that point, the United Nations assistant secretary-general was Carter's former drug czar, Dr. Peter Bourne. He visited the Carter Center to talk about diseases that came from contaminated drinking water, including Guinea worm. No one else wanted to take on the problem. Many considered it too daunting.
"I think like many of us, when when you're confronted by a problem and you're just so overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of it, you know, he left knowing that he didn't have a choice but to do something about it," Weiss said.Guinea worm disease is also known as dracunculiasis, which is Latin for "affliction with little dragons.
Health care workers say many people try to ease their pain by soaking the blister in water, but when the worm comes into contact with water, it releases millions of larvae to start the cycle again. Instead, they've had to offer education about how the parasites spread and make sure they know to keep drinking water clean.
The disease is disruptive and is a significant financial burden, as people are unable to work while the worm emerges. And because there's no immunity from the parasite, they can catch it more than once.Since the '80s, Carter has worked with private and public partners to help eradicate the disease.
"I'm 41, and I was tired," Weiss said. "But then he wouldn't stop. He'd go on Jon Stewart and take a pipe filter and hold it up and talk about Guinea worm, and then he'd go talk to the House of Lords in the UK and ask them to help, and he'd explain that 'if we can do this, if we work together and we put our technical and financial resources together, we can achieve great things.' It takes a special person to do that.
"To actually get rid of a disease entirely is just a huge challenge," she added. "I am just impressed with the fact that they're even started trying instead of just saying, 'oh, no, there's no way we can do that.' "
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