This is scientific Americans 60 second science. I'm Steve Mursky. Got a minute?

We expect Guinea-Wump to be the second disease in the history of the world to be completely eradicated from the face of the earth.

Former President Jimmy Carter in a conversation with Scientific American editor-in-chief

Marriott D. Christina at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City on January 12th.

Can you speak to the Carter Center's work in Guinea Worm and the progress since you began

working on that?

Guinea Worm is a horrible disease.

It's an ancient disease.

It was known in the Bible as a fire serpent. It's the origin of the

Caduceus, a symbol for medical doctors that a guinea worm wrapped around a stiff

as a matter of fact. I said of a serpent. Indeed a health care worker extracts a guinea worm by wrapping the part of the worm that has already emerged from the skin around a stick and then slowly turning the stick to pull the rest of the worm out.

The Wikipedia entry on gu worm disease says that,

quote, this is nearly the same treatment that is noted in the

famous ancient Egyptian medical text,

the Eberus papyrus from 1550 BC and victims described the feeling at the

sight of the worm's emergence as like being on fire.

But we began the eradication of getting worm from the face of the earth in 1986

we found the disease in 20 countries, three in Asia and the rest of them in

Subsahara Africa. When we began to complete our survey, we had been in 23,500 villages and we found 3.5 million cases of Guinea

worm then.

Last year we had 126 cases. So we have been very pleased so far at what the people themselves have done.

We've gone into individual villages, told of what causes it to see is drinking bad water with

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