After my first visit to Nigeria in 2001, when I saw more than my fair share of guinea worm infections, I returned to Nigeria for a book project I claimed to be working on. It was 2009 and I was a freelancer.
Since I was in the neighborhood, I asked the Carter Center if I could go meet the last person — a woman named Grace Otubo — to have guinea worm in Nigeria. After a long and frequently bumpy drive from Abuja, we arrived at the village of Ezza Nkwubor, outside of Enugu.
Based on the greeting I received, I think they must have assumed I was someone more important.
Here, in their own words, and song, they celebrate no longer having guinea worm to deal with. They still have health problems, emphasizing that they still need basic health services such as maternal and child care. They still deal with malaria and pneumonia. But they do have one thing to get up and dance about. I later decided I had to join in the dancing, but deleted that part from the video:
It’s hard for many of us, living inside the safe and comfortable bubble of existence offered by western civilization, to understand just how disruptive, tragic and dangerous it can be to simply get sick in a poor, rural African village.
It’s probably even harder to imagine living with the threat of a three-foot long worm eating its way through your body and then painfully emerging over a period of weeks as you sit — or lay, or writhe — there waiting for the “fiery serpent” or “little dragon” to be done with you.
Nigeria used to be planet-central for guinea worm, with hundreds of thousands of known cases every year (and probably many more unknown cases). This parasitic disease was painfully crippling farming communities, throwing people into poverty.
That doesn’t happen anymore.
Mike Urban
Nigerian woman undergoing guinea worm extraction
Thanks to decades of effort by the Carter Center, working in collaboration with many other organizations and given financial support by donors (including $93.5 million from the Gates Foundation), Nigerians no longer have to fear this threat.
Once afflicting millions worldwide, including the Middle East and the Soviet Union, guinea worm has been fought into just a few isolated corners of the world. There are less than two thousand cases, in four African countries, Sudan, Ethiopia, Mali and Chad.
Last night, at the U.W., some of us got a sneak preview of a documentary film, “Foul Water: Fiery Serpent.” It describes the Carter Center’s ongoing effort to repeat this success story in Sudan — and also make guinea worm only the second human disease (after smallpox) to be eradicated from Earth.
I was in Nigeria last spring (doing research for a book on global health I keep threatening to write). I visited with Carter Center folks and also met Grace Otubo, then a sturdy 79-year-old woman and migrant farmer, in the eastern Nigerian village of Ezza Nwukbor.
Grace was Nigeria’s last known case of guinea worm.
Here’s my (very amateurish, sorry) video of the visit.
