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Guinea worm disease, a painful parasitic infection, struck an estimated 3.5 million people a year in 21 countries when the global campaign against it began in 1986. In January 2026, the Carter Center reported a provisional 10 human cases for 2025, a fall achieved without any vaccine or curative drug.

The Carter Center (Guinea Worm Eradication Program)

Health

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The disease starts when someone drinks water containing tiny water fleas that carry the parasite's larvae. Inside the body the worm grows for about a year, reaching up to a metre in length, then breaks out through a painful blister, usually on the leg or foot, and can leave a person unable to work for weeks. With no vaccine or cure, the campaign has relied on filtering drinking water, treating ponds with larvicide and keeping people with emerging worms out of water sources. Former US President Jimmy Carter, who died in 2024, led the Carter Center's campaign from the start. The Center still works in six African countries: Angola, Cameroon, Chad, Ethiopia, Mali and South Sudan. Infections in animals, especially dogs in Chad, now make the last stretch harder.

Türkçe oku
Acı veren bir parazit hastalığı olan gine kurdu, 1986'da hastalığa karşı küresel kampanya başladığında 21 ülkede yılda tahminen 3,5 milyon kişiyi etkiliyordu. Carter Center'ın Ocak 2026'da açıkladığı geçici verilere göre 2025'te yalnızca 10 insan vakası görüldü. Bu düşüş, hiçbir aşı ya da ilaç olmadan sağlandı.

Hastalık, parazitin larvalarını taşıyan küçük su pirelerinin bulunduğu suyu içmekle bulaşır. Kurt vücudun içinde yaklaşık bir yıl büyür, boyu bir metreye kadar ulaşabilir; sonra genellikle bacakta ya da ayakta açılan acılı bir kabarcıktan dışarı çıkar ve kişiyi haftalarca işinden gücünden edebilir. Aşı ya da tedavi olmadığı için kampanya başka yollara dayandı: içme suyunu süzmek, su birikintilerini larva öldürücü ilaçla arıtmak ve kurdu dışarı çıkmakta olan kişilerin suya girmesini önlemek. 2024'te ölen eski ABD Başkanı Jimmy Carter, Carter Center'ın kampanyasını başından beri yönetti. Merkez bugün hâlâ altı Afrika ülkesinde çalışıyor: Angola, Kamerun, Çad, Etiyopya, Mali ve Güney Sudan. Hayvanlardaki, özellikle Çad'daki köpeklerdeki enfeksiyonlar son aşamayı zorlaştırıyor.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Dracunculiasis
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The plan grew out of the 1942 Beveridge Report, in which the economist William Beveridge proposed a comprehensive health service as part of a welfare system for post-war Britain. Aneurin Bevan, a former coal miner from Wales and health minister in Clement Attlee's Labour government, pushed it through despite opposition from many doctors. On its first day the NHS took over some 2,700 hospitals in England and Wales. Before 1948 people relied on charity hospitals, council hospitals and insurance schemes, but coverage was patchy and many women and children were left out. The care did not stay entirely free: charges for glasses and false teeth came in 1951, leading Bevan to resign, and prescription charges followed in 1952.

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The idea that the face can feed back into feelings, called the facial feedback hypothesis, goes back to Charles Darwin and William James. In a famous 1988 experiment, Fritz Strack and colleagues had people hold a pen in their teeth, which forces a smile, or between their lips, which prevents one, and those in the first group rated cartoons as funnier. In 2016, seventeen laboratories repeated that experiment exactly and found no effect. A 2019 review of 138 studies concluded that the effect is real but small and varies from study to study. The 2022 Many Smiles Collaboration, led by Nicholas Coles and designed jointly by supporters and sceptics of the idea, found that deliberate smiling could both strengthen and start feelings of happiness, while the pen method remained inconclusive.

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The estimate comes from Ron Sender, Shai Fuchs and Ron Milo of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Their reference man is 20 to 30 years old, 170 cm tall and weighs 70 kg. The ten-to-one figure, they found, went back to a single rough calculation from 1972 that had been repeated for decades. Almost all the bacteria live in the colon, the last part of the gut, and together they weigh only about 0.2 kg. Among human cells, red blood cells dominate the count, making up about 84 per cent, while fat and muscle cells, far fewer but much larger, make up most of the body's cell mass. The balance also shifts through the day: a single trip to the toilet empties a quarter to a third of the colon's contents.

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