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The British government has pledged about $31 million to help eradicate guinea worm disease, a donation that public-health experts say will bring them close to finishing the job.
A quarter century ago, the?crippling parasitic infection afflicted 3.5 million people a year in more than 20 countries. This year, there are expected to be just over 1,000 cases in four African countries. More than 98% of those cases are in South Sudan, with a few dozen in Ethiopia, Mali, and Chad.
Guinea worm disease is passed along when people drink water from sources containing water fleas that harbor guinea worm larvae. Once inside a human, the larvae spawn worms that can reach three feet in length. The worms incubate for a year and then emerge slowly through painful lesions. When people soak their lesion-covered limbs in water, the worms release larvae, starting the cycle all over again.
The 25-year-long push to eradicate guinea worm is championed by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Center in Atlanta has led the effort. The donation from the U.K. Department for International Development will be made over four years to the Carter Center.
According to the center, the best way to eliminate the disease is to “prevent people from entering sources of drinking water with an emerging guinea worm and to educate households to always use household or pipe filters to sieve out tiny water fleas carrying infective larvae.”
Donald Hopkins, vice president for health programs for the Carter Center, said $275 million, donated by several governments, has been spent so far wiping out the disease. The U.K. donation will go toward the $75 million the Carter Center estimates is needed to get the job done and to verify eradication.
“We?re very close,” says Hopkins, who has been working on guinea worm eradication since 1980. “This is going to happen. I can?t predict when, but it will be soon.” The Carter Center?s goal is to break the cycle of disease transmission in South Sudan next year, with no cases reported in 2013, he says. It would take three years of no cases to certify that the disease has been wiped out.
The donation comes as the U.K. is growing foreign-aid donations while implementing belt-tightening elsewhere, said Annabelle Malins, British Consul General in Atlanta. “We hope this will be a major tipping point to provide for the full funding requirement” for guinea worm eradication, she said.
Guinea worm disease would be the second human disease to be eradicated after smallpox, and the first to be wiped out without a vaccine or medical treatment. The disease hurts local agriculture in particular as it cripples workers temporarily during planting or harvests.
Image: Associated Press