Nice Time: Jimmy Carter Lives To Defeat The Guinea Worm!
He may have eradicated only the second disease since smallpox!
TRIGGER WARNING: Contains disgusting descriptions of the nasty-ass Guinea Worm, though no photos. Do not Google the photos.
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So this is very nice, former President Jimmy Carter — who is still alive and 99 years young, though in hospice — has succeeded in his decades-long goal to get Guinea Worm Disease cases down to zero before he dies. (Warning, the picture at that link is disgusting.) There have now been zero cases of Guinea Worm disease in the past three months, and there were only 14 last year. Extremely promising signs that maybe they are truly gone forever! If no more Guinea Worms burst through anybody’s flesh within the next nine months, then it’ll officially be the second disease eradicated by humanity after smallpox.
When the Carter Center started trying to take down big Guinea Worm back in 1988, more than 3.5 million people in Africa and India were suffering from it. And BOY WERE THEY SUFFERING, because while the worm won’t directly kill you, it is agonizing and SO RETCHINGLY GROSS. First, nasty-ass fucking worm larva gets into your guts through dirty drinking water. Then it grows in your stomach for a fucking year. And THEN, a fucking THREE-FOOT WORM POPS OUT OF YOUR SKIN which hurts like fucking hell, obviously. And there is no vaccine or cure, the only solution is to pull this FUCKING DISGUSTING WORM out of your fucking skin by winding it around a fucking STICK.
So it is not the glamorous kind of affliction that makes a good poster for a benefit concert or bake sale, or plays well on an ad with Sarah McLachlan playing in the background. But one fixed relatively simply, with clean drinking water. And so that is what sweet peanut-farming Jimmy worked at. His Carter Center partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and has been quietly toiling to eradicate many other un-glamorous diseases that no one in the year of our Lord 2024 should have to suffer from, including: poliomyelitis (a virus that paralyzes mostly children), mumps, rubella, lymphatic filariasis (aka elephantiasis, a roundworm transmitted by mosquitoes), cysticercosis (tapeworm infection), measles, river blindness, and yaws (a nasty spirochete bacteria that causes bursting lesions).
Remember when Southern Baptists used to do nice things sometimes?
What a legacy, to add on top of his other achievements! A Nobel Peace Prize, so many Habitat for Humanity houses. The first president to get into green energy who installed solar panels on the White House, all the way back in ‘79. Scribe of not-very-erotic poetry, and 30 other books! Survivor of liver cancer for like a decade! Husband, father, and all-around good guy.
Raise your glasses to Jimmy, may he live forever!
I would never say I've met any presidents, but when Bill was running for president, I was at one of his speeches and as he went by hundreds of people on the way out, all with an outstretched hand hoping he'd shake it, mine was one he shook. He even made eye contact for a second. Decades later in an eerily similar moment Hilary Clinton touched my hand (without shaking it) and... that's as close as I get to national politics. (Unless you count my work for the Department of Justice, which wasn't really political.)
Even so, I was on a bit of a high both times. I wasn't old enough to be going to Carter's campaign events (unless my parents took me, which they didn't), but as much as I'm normally down on hero worship, I find myself wishing that I could have shaken Jimmy's hand instead of Bill's. Clinton was a decent president and a lousy guy. Jimmy, I am told, was a below average president (though I am not really sure how much of that he had control over, given the influence of OPEC and how the Iranian revolution wasn't exactly the guy's fault -- as far as the choices he actually made and the policies he actually championed, he seemed a great president to me), but he's a fantastic man.
Imagine going through Habitat for Humanity for your home. For those who don't know, you're expected to volunteer building others' homes while you're on the waitlist for your turn. When I was a H4H volunteer in Portland (don't praise me, I did it for all of like 3 months when the weather was nice and didn't go back the next year) I worked with LOTS of other people, and the family for whom the home was being built was always at the centre, busy with every little thing. You didn't ask them anything you didn't need to, b/c like I said, they were busy. But there were lots of times when the house was farther along when people would ask them things like, "Would you rather have the light fixture here or here?"
I picture Jimmy going to get his orders from the site manager talking to the family, going back and forth to the wood pile, driving nails and turning screws as I have seen him do in videos, and I think about what it would mean to live in that house knowing that he didn't just touch your hand that one time; his hands touched every part of your home, infusing it with his wish that you remain sheltered and whole, healthy and comfortable, you and your family for all the remaining years of your life.
I don't know Jimmy Carter, but the man makes me cry anyway.
Ugh. I have to clean house, make food, and do work for the ever-hungry eyeballs around here.
But there's no reason I can't do all that with a glass of wine in my hand. Well, no reason other than that there's no way to sweep the kitchen with one hand busy, but fuck sweeping the kitchen.