> To fully eradicate the disease, cases in animals (infected by the same species of worm) must also be wiped out. In 2025, animal cases were detected in Chad (147 cases), Mali (17), Cameroon (445), Angola (70), Ethiopia (1), and South Sudan (3).
Well then, it's good you didn't say that then, considering that ivermectin has been on the WHO list of essential medicines since 1987 and its discoverers were awarded the 2015 Nobel Price in Physiology or Medicine for it.
Saying that something might be "finally something" that ivermectin can help with would have been embarrassing.
It would have been especially embarrassing because the link you gave gives two things ivermectin helps with. After concluding that ivermectin did not affect the guinea worms it says:
> No adverse reaction to treatment was seen. It appears that ivermectin can be used safely as mass chemotherapy against onchocerciasis and lymphatic filariasis in areas where guinea-worm is also endemic.
They are saying that if a patient has onchocerciasis or lymphatic filariasis it is safe to use go ahead and use ivermectin (which is the normal treatment for those) to treat those, even if the patient has guinea worms.
Please share this with someone who doesn't know the story yet. Ingenuity alone can't save our species. We also need the will to do good. We are living through a moment of deep cynicism about our ability to solve existential problems. Let this be a reminder of what we are capable of.
Come on. It's 2026: I, Pencil isn't a mic drop. It's a cliche. It's 70 years old, assume everyone's read it.
Also, your drop of it betrays a pretty fundamental lack of understanding. I stand by my statement that free market could never accomplish something like this. Eradicating a disease is nothing like a business making a pencil to sell.
I worked for the Carter Center in South Sudan for a little less than a year in 2011. It was an extraordinarily tough job and required perseverance, humility, creative problem solving, negotiation, and acceptance. Events outside our control, like civil war, made eradication even harder.
The Carter Center teams should be very proud of what they accomplished. It would’ve been nice to get it done before Jimmy passed though
The eradication program works by offering cash rewards for reporting cases in areas where the worm is present. Those reports are then investigated and followed to prevent transmission and identify the source.
Clever. I wonder if the same model can be reused for other diseases.
Any individual presenting with the disease who meets all the criteria for containment is now rewarded with 500 South Sudanese pounds (SSP). The informer is given 100 SSP.
This is amazing, those things are an absolutely nasty parasite from out of a sci-fi horror movie. If you drink contaminated water with them it releases its larva into your body which burrow out of your digestive systems into your body consuming your nutrients for a year or more as it grows, then migrates towards your legs and creates debilitatingly painful blisters trying to force its way out over the course of weeks, and when you submerge the wound in water to relieve the burning pain it releases its larva into the water to infect others. Also don't try to pull it out even when its halfway out of your body or it will snap and die and give you a super nasty infection as it decays inside of you.
Eradication of the Guinea worm will be one of the huge milestones in the history of humankind. Just reading about them is nightmarish. In 1986 estimated 3,500,000 people had an infestation. Now we're well below 100. However eradication also needs animal cases to go to zero which are still in the hundreds.
Anyway, really great news about humanity beating one of its many terrible enemies just like the Malaria vaccine.
>The eradication program works by offering cash rewards for reporting cases in areas where the worm is present.
I wonder how they prevented a cobra effect[0] here? Clearly they did avoid it since there were so few human cases. Or maybe some of the animal cases reflect this?
I would assume the amount they paid is "valuable, but not 'disabled by worm for the prize' valuable", or it's just that hard to find the larvae now.
There's also probably a part where if someone was caught having released it in their area, they would probably be found dead in a ditch for inflicting that on people.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 54.7 ms ] thread> To fully eradicate the disease, cases in animals (infected by the same species of worm) must also be wiped out. In 2025, animal cases were detected in Chad (147 cases), Mali (17), Cameroon (445), Angola (70), Ethiopia (1), and South Sudan (3).
Saying that something might be "finally something" that ivermectin can help with would have been embarrassing.
It would have been especially embarrassing because the link you gave gives two things ivermectin helps with. After concluding that ivermectin did not affect the guinea worms it says:
> No adverse reaction to treatment was seen. It appears that ivermectin can be used safely as mass chemotherapy against onchocerciasis and lymphatic filariasis in areas where guinea-worm is also endemic.
They are saying that if a patient has onchocerciasis or lymphatic filariasis it is safe to use go ahead and use ivermectin (which is the normal treatment for those) to treat those, even if the patient has guinea worms.
So good thing you didn't say it!
https://www.cartercenter.org/programs/guinea-worm/
Also, your drop of it betrays a pretty fundamental lack of understanding. I stand by my statement that free market could never accomplish something like this. Eradicating a disease is nothing like a business making a pencil to sell.
So yes in a sense it is free market.
Especially disease eradication is beating nature in macrobiology and philantropic foundations are the optimal tool to do that.
10 _known_ cases
The Carter Center teams should be very proud of what they accomplished. It would’ve been nice to get it done before Jimmy passed though
Clever. I wonder if the same model can be reused for other diseases.
An example:
https://www.who.int/news/item/11-04-2014-south-sudan-introdu...
Any individual presenting with the disease who meets all the criteria for containment is now rewarded with 500 South Sudanese pounds (SSP). The informer is given 100 SSP.
Anyway, really great news about humanity beating one of its many terrible enemies just like the Malaria vaccine.
I wonder how they prevented a cobra effect[0] here? Clearly they did avoid it since there were so few human cases. Or maybe some of the animal cases reflect this?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_Effect
There's also probably a part where if someone was caught having released it in their area, they would probably be found dead in a ditch for inflicting that on people.