7 ms·

Guinea worm on track to be 2nd eradicated human disease; only 10 cases in 2025

317 points by bookofjoe 9mo ago

cubefox 9mo ago
Sounds like there is still some way to go: > 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).
- jasongill 9mo ago
  Isn't fewer than 1000 infected animals in an area that covers 6 countries pretty good? Obviously there's still work to do, but I would have expected hundreds of thousands or millions of animal cases if it was an epidemic
  - jaggederest 9mo ago
    Few cases is good, but if there are any, the whole machinery of surveillance, treatment, and education has to be in place. As soon as we reach 0 cases for a certain amount of time, all those resources can be redirected to other neglected tropical diseases that haven't been wiped out, like onchocerciasis, loa loa, yaws, lymphatic filariasis, trachoma, and all the others. Yaws in particular is a good candidate for eradication.
  - noname120 9mo ago
    Are they just the known infected animals or is it an estimation of the total count of infected animals?
poulpy123 9mo ago
The decrease from 3.5 million cases to only 15 is impressive but I don't see how we can eradicate zoonoses
- bookofjoe 9mo ago
  >In 2024, there were just 15 cases, and, according to the provisional tally for 2025, the number is down to just 10.
- bawolff 9mo ago
  From the article it looks like they are working on that too > 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).
  - Insanity 9mo ago
    But the question would be how many more go undetected in those animals. (I.e if wild animals carry it, how accurate are these numbers).
    - poulpy123 9mo ago
      glancing at the wikipedia page on the topic it seems that it is limited to dogs, cat and baboons, and animal hosts have been only proved in the 2010s, so I guess they are unlikely to become infected by the parasite
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 9mo ago
    It was a somewhat recent discovery that there were animal reservoirs escaping detection. Carter had hoped to outlive the worm, but it was thought that the animal pools were going to make full eradication take an additional 20 years.
  - MrDunham 9mo ago
    Those are bonkers (low) numbers compared to the 3.5M (human?) cases if I'm to believe the GPs comment. It's also crazy how much Mother Theresa's quote rings true, even in reverse ("If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.") When I initially read 3.5M cases, I thought "wow, that's a lot", and somehow the 445 animal cases in Cameroon felt (at first) more real and similarly "a lot". No comment other than interesting how our human brains work and distort how numbers "feel". Once my rational brain kicked in, realized that's over 5,000 years for the current number of animal cases to match the former number of human cases. The future is awesome.
buellerbueller 9mo ago
[flagged]
- johnhenry 9mo ago
  [flagged]
MPSimmons 9mo ago
I was going to say, "finally something that ivermectin can help with!" except https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7974686/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7974686/
- gus_massa 9mo ago
  Ivermectin is a very good dewormer! Most 2020 crap studies were easy to make because ivermectin was already distributed to big populations as a dewormer. I'm the guy that every time someone calls it a good horse dewormer I reply: "And a good human dewormer too!"
  - jfengel 9mo ago
    True. But you can't get a prescription for the human version unless you actually have worms. So if you're taking it for some other reason, you're probably getting the version for horses, which you can buy by the bucket.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    - giardini 9mo ago
      Ivermectin is also prescribed for scabies and may sometimes be prescribed for bedbugs. It can be taken orally or in a topical version.
      - assaddayinh 9mo ago
        Is that the medicine subscribed to poison the humans the bedbugs subsist on? Basically turning yourself into a poisonous lunch?
  - groundzeros2015 9mo ago
    The media knowingly repeated “horse dewormer” because it made people they don’t like look dumb.
randomfrogs 9mo ago
[flagged]
- aparadja 9mo ago
  Snarky comments like this would be better suited for reddit or other platforms.
  - tchalla 9mo ago
    OP, don’t post snarky comments on any platform. It’s not suited for most places.
  - buellerbueller 9mo ago
    Scientifically illiterate grifters would be better suited for roles other than head of HHS, but here we are, living in imperfect times.
fanatic2pope 9mo ago
Thanks, Carter! https://www.cartercenter.org/programs/guinea-worm/ https://www.cartercenter.org/programs/guinea-worm/
- aaronblohowiak 9mo ago
  best _former_ president of all time.
  - overfeed 9mo ago
    I won't stand for Carter slander: he was a darn good president too. What he wasn't good at, was politicking, and that was because he also was a good man, to a fault. He gave an honest answer to a question on if he had ever lusted after a woman who was not his wife, and reaped a scandal.
    - assaddayinh 9mo ago
      He created modern iran by trying to ditch the shah?
      - jakobnissen 9mo ago
        No way that created the modern Islamic Iran. Carter supporter the shah. To the extend USA decided the outcome, it was by supporting the shah for too long, and for the US role in the 1953 coup. But IMO the USa played third fiddle in that story, this was between Ruholla and the shah
  - dyauspitr 9mo ago
    I just listened to a the rest is history podcast and he had a few things he was lacking and wasn’t particularly flattering but he was an upstanding citizen at the very least.
  - wbl 9mo ago
    He's helicopter crash away from being remembered as a daring wartime president.
atdt 9mo ago
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.
- carlosft 9mo ago
  > We are living through a moment of deep cynicism about our ability to solve existential problems. I have no doubt that we can create a really miraculous future. I am just increasingly pessimistic about our collective desire to do so.
  - jackyinger 9mo ago
    Cultivating optimism is the first step. Optimism is irrational, you can just choose to have it (of course thinking about good things that have happened helps). Optimism is the precondition for doing good. So what if there’s a low collective will at the moment. Do your part to be part to grow the collective will to good. Go volunteer for a good cause (food bank, community organizations, etc.), donate to good causes, just be friendly to other people you see.
    - secos 9mo ago
      You do not need optimism to do good. It helps motivate, but its not required.
    - kiba 9mo ago
      Wouldn't say optimism is irrational. There are good things happening in the world in spite of all the bad things in the world. Pessimism that leads to a self fulfilling prophecy is irrational, but you still need a win. A win is fuel.
      - quesera 9mo ago
        Choosing a belief that is more desirable than the most likely case, is by definition irrational, and can be called optimistic. Choosing a belief that is less desirable than the most likely, is equally irrational, clearly pessimistic, and often self-fulfilling. So the ideal belief system is irrational (optimistic) but only to a chosen and realistic extent. Somewhere between Pollyanna and Eeyore, but more P than E. And as irrational psychologies go, moderate-P is by far the more successful of the two.
palmotea 9mo ago
The free market could never accomplish something like this.
- bugeats 9mo ago
  Consider what you might choose to do for the public good with the 30% of your income that is taken from you in the name of the public good. Philanthropy is a predictable outcome of an individual having met the basic needs of Maslow’s hierarchy. Consider how many more philanthropists would be created by returning this 30% back to individual discernment.
  - harladsinsteden 9mo ago
    Which 30% are you talking about? Taxes? If so: From what do you build things like infrastructure?
    - Loughla 9mo ago
      If you've ever worked with a church you know that donation and good will is not a way to ensure anything is structurally sound. Donations always come with asterisks. Nobody wants to make sure the roof is shingled and doesn't leak but everybody leaves money for new stained glass windows or the organ that nobody knows how to play.
  - hobs 9mo ago
    A lot less because they'd be dead from easily preventable diseases in their water supply?
  - palmotea 9mo ago
    > Consider how many more philanthropists would be created by returning this 30% back to individual discernment. Many, many fewer than you assume. Libertarians like to make lots of good-sounding promises to justify their favored radical policy, but it's bullshit and the promises don't pan out when tested [1]. By that point, the libertarian has gotten what he wanted and moved on. [1] Or their policy was already tried and already failed, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46876387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46876387, leading to reforms to fix the problems that they're now mad about and want to undo.
hulitu 9mo ago
> only 10 cases in 2025 10 _known_ cases
- 1over137 9mo ago
  True, but given the symptoms, you'd think anyone infected would report it. So there's probably some unknown ones, but probably not a huge number.
giantfrog 9mo ago
RFK Jr: “Not so fast”
- I_dream_of_Geni 9mo ago
  This cracked me up...
jswiss0424 9mo ago
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
- ahazred8ta 9mo ago
  Spread the word: "The guinea worm is on its last legs."
  - theGeatZhopa 9mo ago
    _"a lie has no legs *_ the guinea worm neither..
31337Logic 9mo ago
Take THAT, God! ;-)
- onraglanroad 9mo ago
  It's a peculiarity of the 21st century that the people most likely to blame God for human events are, in fact, atheists.
  - QuadmasterXLII 9mo ago
    Where in this thread is someone blaming god for anything? Who in this is atheist? What?
    - onraglanroad 9mo ago
      You seem very confused. Try reading the comment I replied to and then understanding the context.
      - protocolture 9mo ago
        How do you know he is an atheist?
      - 31337Logic 9mo ago
        Attaboy. When called-out over your post, the winning move is to tell that person that they are confused and failed to grasp your "context". It's never to revisit and clarify your original position. Good work, champ!
  - wiseowise 9mo ago
    I think they imply that supposedly benevolent god created this horror incarnate that humans fixed.
    - 31337Logic 9mo ago
      Exactly this.
lysace 9mo ago
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. An example: https://www.who.int/news/item/11-04-2014-south-sudan-introduces-reward-to-accelerate-detection-and-reporting 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.
- MagicMoonlight 9mo ago
  I’m not sure it is clever, because you’re bound to get an entrepreneur who infects their local school to farm rewards. It’s inevitable with these kinds of schemes.
  - lysace 9mo ago
    Somehow it seems to have worked here. There's probably a bit more to the secret sauce.
  - buellerbueller 9mo ago
    You then create a bigger bounty to identify the entrepreneurs, and now it's bounties all the way down.
  - onraglanroad 9mo ago
    500 SSP is about 4 USD. If you have the ability to come up with the scheme, you can do better with pretty much anything else.
  - gus_massa 9mo ago
    It has been done for snakes. Nobody minds you have a snake farm and sell them to the government. Neighbors may even sell you captured mices. On the other hand, infecting the children at the school will make everyone go to your house, probably burn it and hit you until you are rescued by the police. Did I mention the local police chief has nephew in the school?
LePetitPrince 9mo ago
[dead]
somalihoaxes 9mo ago
[flagged]
AngryData 9mo ago
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.
- trhway 9mo ago
  >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. Pardon probably stupid question, yet i'm wondering why (under local or general anesthesia of course) it isn't possible to "drain snake" the remainder of the worm and to clean/disinfect the worm channel that way. After all we insert similar flexible stuff into blood vessels from say thigh all the way up to the heart.
  - dathanb82 9mo ago
    As you might expect from the description -- largely passed on via contaminated water -- the guinea worm is mostly present in areas of extreme poverty. Even if such a treatment were feasible, it would be inaccessible to most of the relevant population.
  - sdiupIGPWEfh 9mo ago
    Anaphylactic shock, and possibly death, is a potential outcome from the worm breaking internally. Far too risky.
  - shattl 9mo ago
    Not a stupid question at all, it's actually quite logical thinking. Here's why it's not that straightforward: The worm is extremely fragile. Guinea worms can be up to a meter long but are very thin and delicate. When you pull too quickly or forcefully, the worm breaks. This is the central problem — it's not like a catheter or guide wire, which are engineered to have tensile strength. The worm's body is essentially a thin biological tube filled with millions of larvae. Breaking it is the real danger. When the worm ruptures, it releases those larvae and bodily fluids into the surrounding tissue, triggering a severe inflammatory reaction, secondary bacterial infection, and sometimes abscess formation or sepsis. This is far worse than the worm itself. So the traditional slow winding onto a stick (a few centimeters per day) works with the worm's own gradual release from the tissue it's embedded in. The path isn't a clean channel. Unlike a blood vessel, which is a defined, smooth lumen, the worm sits winding through subcutaneous connective tissue. It doesn't create a neat tunnel — it's loosely embedded and adhered to surrounding tissue along its length. There's no "pipe" to snake a tool through. A catheter in a blood vessel follows a pre-existing anatomical highway; here there's no such structure. Surgical extraction is sometimes attempted, but it requires carefully dissecting along the entire worm's path without rupturing it — which is technically demanding, time-consuming, and requires facilities and skills that are often unavailable in the rural sub-Saharan communities where the disease occurs. For a worm that may wind through 30–60 cm of tissue, that's a significant operation for a condition that, while painful, is usually self-limiting. The real solution turned out to be prevention. The Carter Center's eradication campaign brought cases from ~3.5 million per year in the 1980s to fewer than 15 per year now, almost entirely through water filtration and education — making the surgical question largely moot. So in short: the worm isn't strong enough to pull, the path isn't clean enough to navigate, breaking it makes everything worse, and the settings where it occurs rarely have the surgical capacity for careful dissection.
basilikum 9mo ago
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.
- MrDunham 9mo ago
  I mentioned in another comment how hard it is for our brains to really comprehend the orders of magnitude difference between all animal cases (~680) and the former number of human cases (3.5M). It would take ~5000 years at the current annual rate of animal cases to match the number of human cases just 40 years ago. That's The Great Pyramid of Giza ago time... PLUS the amount of time since Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael roamed the earth. The cool thing is that at a few hundred, one could theoretically* round up all (known) animal cases left. That's truly incredible work getting to this point if you think about it. * Yes, geopolitical issues, geography, and plenty of other reasons might make this somewhat impossible... but the fact that we can actively picture a few hundred animals in our brains means that it's a very attainable goal.
I_dream_of_Geni 9mo ago
Honest question here: how is a worm (parasite) considered a "disease"? I Googled this question two different ways and got two different responses.
- nemomarx 9mo ago
  I guess the same way a virus is a disease, in that a small living thing gets inside you and harms you / causes immune system reactions? I think technically you get a parasite and then it causes a disease in reaction, but if it's a parasite you can spread it's basically fine to model it / talk about eradicating it in the same way right?
- metalliqaz 9mo ago
  We use "disease" for maladies caused by infections (virus, bacteria), and we use "disease" for maladies caused by genetics (cancer), caused by chemicals (lung disease), and so forth. So yeah, a parasite certainly would qualify I think.
  - I_dream_of_Geni 9mo ago
    And (weirdly, I think) a few years back they called alcoholism and smoking diseases, which, well, really??
- duskwuff 9mo ago
  How would you draw the line? The common cold, tuberculosis, malaria, and hookworm are all caused by foreign bodies which enter the human body, reproduce, and cause illness; the only difference is the size of those agents (virus, bacterium, single-cell parasite, multicellular parasite).
- cperciva 9mo ago
  The parasite is not the disease; the parasite causes the disease. Similarly, SARS-COV-2 is a virus which causes Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) and the Human Immunodeficiency Virus causes AIDS. People often conflate parasites or viruses with the diseases they cause, and it's practically impossible to eliminate the diseases without eliminating the causative agent, but they are technically distinct concepts.
JohnMunsch 9mo ago
Hey, let's not be defeatist. Give RFK Jr. a shot at it and we can bring it roaring back.
- Tagbert 9mo ago
  We know that he’s very pro-worm
  - ThrowawayTestr 9mo ago
    What are you talking about? Dude loves ivermectin.
ufocia 9mo ago
Kudos, but it seems that "eradicated" is a bit too strong of a word, since it appears that the worm will still be capable of infecting new patients.
rozab 9mo ago
>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? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_Effect
- rincebrain 9mo ago
  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.
MrGuts 9mo ago
Quick! Someone please call the HHS Secretary and have funding for this program cut to the bone!

317 points by bookofjoe 9mo ago

Sounds like there is still some way to go: > 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).

jasongill 9mo ago
Isn't fewer than 1000 infected animals in an area that covers 6 countries pretty good? Obviously there's still work to do, but I would have expected hundreds of thousands or millions of animal cases if it was an epidemic
- jaggederest 9mo ago
  Few cases is good, but if there are any, the whole machinery of surveillance, treatment, and education has to be in place. As soon as we reach 0 cases for a certain amount of time, all those resources can be redirected to other neglected tropical diseases that haven't been wiped out, like onchocerciasis, loa loa, yaws, lymphatic filariasis, trachoma, and all the others. Yaws in particular is a good candidate for eradication.
- noname120 9mo ago
  Are they just the known infected animals or is it an estimation of the total count of infected animals?

poulpy123 9mo ago

The decrease from 3.5 million cases to only 15 is impressive but I don't see how we can eradicate zoonoses

bookofjoe 9mo ago
>In 2024, there were just 15 cases, and, according to the provisional tally for 2025, the number is down to just 10.
bawolff 9mo ago
From the article it looks like they are working on that too > 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).
- Insanity 9mo ago
  But the question would be how many more go undetected in those animals. (I.e if wild animals carry it, how accurate are these numbers).
  - poulpy123 9mo ago
    glancing at the wikipedia page on the topic it seems that it is limited to dogs, cat and baboons, and animal hosts have been only proved in the 2010s, so I guess they are unlikely to become infected by the parasite
- 0cf8612b2e1e 9mo ago
  It was a somewhat recent discovery that there were animal reservoirs escaping detection. Carter had hoped to outlive the worm, but it was thought that the animal pools were going to make full eradication take an additional 20 years.
- MrDunham 9mo ago
  Those are bonkers (low) numbers compared to the 3.5M (human?) cases if I'm to believe the GPs comment. It's also crazy how much Mother Theresa's quote rings true, even in reverse ("If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.") When I initially read 3.5M cases, I thought "wow, that's a lot", and somehow the 445 animal cases in Cameroon felt (at first) more real and similarly "a lot". No comment other than interesting how our human brains work and distort how numbers "feel". Once my rational brain kicked in, realized that's over 5,000 years for the current number of animal cases to match the former number of human cases. The future is awesome.

buellerbueller 9mo ago

[flagged]

johnhenry 9mo ago
[flagged]

MPSimmons 9mo ago

I was going to say, "finally something that ivermectin can help with!" except https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7974686/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7974686/

gus_massa 9mo ago
Ivermectin is a very good dewormer! Most 2020 crap studies were easy to make because ivermectin was already distributed to big populations as a dewormer. I'm the guy that every time someone calls it a good horse dewormer I reply: "And a good human dewormer too!"
- jfengel 9mo ago
  True. But you can't get a prescription for the human version unless you actually have worms. So if you're taking it for some other reason, you're probably getting the version for horses, which you can buy by the bucket.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - giardini 9mo ago
    Ivermectin is also prescribed for scabies and may sometimes be prescribed for bedbugs. It can be taken orally or in a topical version.
    - assaddayinh 9mo ago
      Is that the medicine subscribed to poison the humans the bedbugs subsist on? Basically turning yourself into a poisonous lunch?
- groundzeros2015 9mo ago
  The media knowingly repeated “horse dewormer” because it made people they don’t like look dumb.

randomfrogs 9mo ago

[flagged]

aparadja 9mo ago
Snarky comments like this would be better suited for reddit or other platforms.
- tchalla 9mo ago
  OP, don’t post snarky comments on any platform. It’s not suited for most places.
- buellerbueller 9mo ago
  Scientifically illiterate grifters would be better suited for roles other than head of HHS, but here we are, living in imperfect times.

fanatic2pope 9mo ago

Thanks, Carter! https://www.cartercenter.org/programs/guinea-worm/ https://www.cartercenter.org/programs/guinea-worm/

aaronblohowiak 9mo ago
best _former_ president of all time.
- overfeed 9mo ago
  I won't stand for Carter slander: he was a darn good president too. What he wasn't good at, was politicking, and that was because he also was a good man, to a fault. He gave an honest answer to a question on if he had ever lusted after a woman who was not his wife, and reaped a scandal.
  - assaddayinh 9mo ago
    He created modern iran by trying to ditch the shah?
    - jakobnissen 9mo ago
      No way that created the modern Islamic Iran. Carter supporter the shah. To the extend USA decided the outcome, it was by supporting the shah for too long, and for the US role in the 1953 coup. But IMO the USa played third fiddle in that story, this was between Ruholla and the shah
- dyauspitr 9mo ago
  I just listened to a the rest is history podcast and he had a few things he was lacking and wasn’t particularly flattering but he was an upstanding citizen at the very least.
- wbl 9mo ago
  He's helicopter crash away from being remembered as a daring wartime president.

atdt 9mo ago

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.

carlosft 9mo ago
> We are living through a moment of deep cynicism about our ability to solve existential problems. I have no doubt that we can create a really miraculous future. I am just increasingly pessimistic about our collective desire to do so.
- jackyinger 9mo ago
  Cultivating optimism is the first step. Optimism is irrational, you can just choose to have it (of course thinking about good things that have happened helps). Optimism is the precondition for doing good. So what if there’s a low collective will at the moment. Do your part to be part to grow the collective will to good. Go volunteer for a good cause (food bank, community organizations, etc.), donate to good causes, just be friendly to other people you see.
  - secos 9mo ago
    You do not need optimism to do good. It helps motivate, but its not required.
  - kiba 9mo ago
    Wouldn't say optimism is irrational. There are good things happening in the world in spite of all the bad things in the world. Pessimism that leads to a self fulfilling prophecy is irrational, but you still need a win. A win is fuel.
    - quesera 9mo ago
      Choosing a belief that is more desirable than the most likely case, is by definition irrational, and can be called optimistic. Choosing a belief that is less desirable than the most likely, is equally irrational, clearly pessimistic, and often self-fulfilling. So the ideal belief system is irrational (optimistic) but only to a chosen and realistic extent. Somewhere between Pollyanna and Eeyore, but more P than E. And as irrational psychologies go, moderate-P is by far the more successful of the two.

palmotea 9mo ago

The free market could never accomplish something like this.

bugeats 9mo ago
Consider what you might choose to do for the public good with the 30% of your income that is taken from you in the name of the public good. Philanthropy is a predictable outcome of an individual having met the basic needs of Maslow’s hierarchy. Consider how many more philanthropists would be created by returning this 30% back to individual discernment.
- harladsinsteden 9mo ago
  Which 30% are you talking about? Taxes? If so: From what do you build things like infrastructure?
  - Loughla 9mo ago
    If you've ever worked with a church you know that donation and good will is not a way to ensure anything is structurally sound. Donations always come with asterisks. Nobody wants to make sure the roof is shingled and doesn't leak but everybody leaves money for new stained glass windows or the organ that nobody knows how to play.
- hobs 9mo ago
  A lot less because they'd be dead from easily preventable diseases in their water supply?
- palmotea 9mo ago
  > Consider how many more philanthropists would be created by returning this 30% back to individual discernment. Many, many fewer than you assume. Libertarians like to make lots of good-sounding promises to justify their favored radical policy, but it's bullshit and the promises don't pan out when tested [1]. By that point, the libertarian has gotten what he wanted and moved on. [1] Or their policy was already tried and already failed, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46876387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46876387, leading to reforms to fix the problems that they're now mad about and want to undo.

hulitu 9mo ago

> only 10 cases in 2025 10 _known_ cases

1over137 9mo ago
True, but given the symptoms, you'd think anyone infected would report it. So there's probably some unknown ones, but probably not a huge number.

giantfrog 9mo ago

RFK Jr: “Not so fast”

I_dream_of_Geni 9mo ago
This cracked me up...

jswiss0424 9mo ago

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

ahazred8ta 9mo ago
Spread the word: "The guinea worm is on its last legs."
- theGeatZhopa 9mo ago
  _"a lie has no legs *_ the guinea worm neither..

31337Logic 9mo ago

Take THAT, God! ;-)

onraglanroad 9mo ago
It's a peculiarity of the 21st century that the people most likely to blame God for human events are, in fact, atheists.
- QuadmasterXLII 9mo ago
  Where in this thread is someone blaming god for anything? Who in this is atheist? What?
  - onraglanroad 9mo ago
    You seem very confused. Try reading the comment I replied to and then understanding the context.
    - protocolture 9mo ago
      How do you know he is an atheist?
    - 31337Logic 9mo ago
      Attaboy. When called-out over your post, the winning move is to tell that person that they are confused and failed to grasp your "context". It's never to revisit and clarify your original position. Good work, champ!
- wiseowise 9mo ago
  I think they imply that supposedly benevolent god created this horror incarnate that humans fixed.
  - 31337Logic 9mo ago
    Exactly this.

lysace 9mo ago

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. An example: https://www.who.int/news/item/11-04-2014-south-sudan-introduces-reward-to-accelerate-detection-and-reporting 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.

MagicMoonlight 9mo ago
I’m not sure it is clever, because you’re bound to get an entrepreneur who infects their local school to farm rewards. It’s inevitable with these kinds of schemes.
- lysace 9mo ago
  Somehow it seems to have worked here. There's probably a bit more to the secret sauce.
- buellerbueller 9mo ago
  You then create a bigger bounty to identify the entrepreneurs, and now it's bounties all the way down.
- onraglanroad 9mo ago
  500 SSP is about 4 USD. If you have the ability to come up with the scheme, you can do better with pretty much anything else.
- gus_massa 9mo ago
  It has been done for snakes. Nobody minds you have a snake farm and sell them to the government. Neighbors may even sell you captured mices. On the other hand, infecting the children at the school will make everyone go to your house, probably burn it and hit you until you are rescued by the police. Did I mention the local police chief has nephew in the school?

LePetitPrince 9mo ago

[dead]

somalihoaxes 9mo ago

[flagged]

AngryData 9mo ago

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.

trhway 9mo ago
>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. Pardon probably stupid question, yet i'm wondering why (under local or general anesthesia of course) it isn't possible to "drain snake" the remainder of the worm and to clean/disinfect the worm channel that way. After all we insert similar flexible stuff into blood vessels from say thigh all the way up to the heart.
- dathanb82 9mo ago
  As you might expect from the description -- largely passed on via contaminated water -- the guinea worm is mostly present in areas of extreme poverty. Even if such a treatment were feasible, it would be inaccessible to most of the relevant population.
- sdiupIGPWEfh 9mo ago
  Anaphylactic shock, and possibly death, is a potential outcome from the worm breaking internally. Far too risky.
- shattl 9mo ago
  Not a stupid question at all, it's actually quite logical thinking. Here's why it's not that straightforward: The worm is extremely fragile. Guinea worms can be up to a meter long but are very thin and delicate. When you pull too quickly or forcefully, the worm breaks. This is the central problem — it's not like a catheter or guide wire, which are engineered to have tensile strength. The worm's body is essentially a thin biological tube filled with millions of larvae. Breaking it is the real danger. When the worm ruptures, it releases those larvae and bodily fluids into the surrounding tissue, triggering a severe inflammatory reaction, secondary bacterial infection, and sometimes abscess formation or sepsis. This is far worse than the worm itself. So the traditional slow winding onto a stick (a few centimeters per day) works with the worm's own gradual release from the tissue it's embedded in. The path isn't a clean channel. Unlike a blood vessel, which is a defined, smooth lumen, the worm sits winding through subcutaneous connective tissue. It doesn't create a neat tunnel — it's loosely embedded and adhered to surrounding tissue along its length. There's no "pipe" to snake a tool through. A catheter in a blood vessel follows a pre-existing anatomical highway; here there's no such structure. Surgical extraction is sometimes attempted, but it requires carefully dissecting along the entire worm's path without rupturing it — which is technically demanding, time-consuming, and requires facilities and skills that are often unavailable in the rural sub-Saharan communities where the disease occurs. For a worm that may wind through 30–60 cm of tissue, that's a significant operation for a condition that, while painful, is usually self-limiting. The real solution turned out to be prevention. The Carter Center's eradication campaign brought cases from ~3.5 million per year in the 1980s to fewer than 15 per year now, almost entirely through water filtration and education — making the surgical question largely moot. So in short: the worm isn't strong enough to pull, the path isn't clean enough to navigate, breaking it makes everything worse, and the settings where it occurs rarely have the surgical capacity for careful dissection.

basilikum 9mo ago

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.

MrDunham 9mo ago
I mentioned in another comment how hard it is for our brains to really comprehend the orders of magnitude difference between all animal cases (~680) and the former number of human cases (3.5M). It would take ~5000 years at the current annual rate of animal cases to match the number of human cases just 40 years ago. That's The Great Pyramid of Giza ago time... PLUS the amount of time since Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael roamed the earth. The cool thing is that at a few hundred, one could theoretically* round up all (known) animal cases left. That's truly incredible work getting to this point if you think about it. * Yes, geopolitical issues, geography, and plenty of other reasons might make this somewhat impossible... but the fact that we can actively picture a few hundred animals in our brains means that it's a very attainable goal.

I_dream_of_Geni 9mo ago

Honest question here: how is a worm (parasite) considered a "disease"? I Googled this question two different ways and got two different responses.

nemomarx 9mo ago
I guess the same way a virus is a disease, in that a small living thing gets inside you and harms you / causes immune system reactions? I think technically you get a parasite and then it causes a disease in reaction, but if it's a parasite you can spread it's basically fine to model it / talk about eradicating it in the same way right?
metalliqaz 9mo ago
We use "disease" for maladies caused by infections (virus, bacteria), and we use "disease" for maladies caused by genetics (cancer), caused by chemicals (lung disease), and so forth. So yeah, a parasite certainly would qualify I think.
- I_dream_of_Geni 9mo ago
  And (weirdly, I think) a few years back they called alcoholism and smoking diseases, which, well, really??
duskwuff 9mo ago
How would you draw the line? The common cold, tuberculosis, malaria, and hookworm are all caused by foreign bodies which enter the human body, reproduce, and cause illness; the only difference is the size of those agents (virus, bacterium, single-cell parasite, multicellular parasite).
cperciva 9mo ago
The parasite is not the disease; the parasite causes the disease. Similarly, SARS-COV-2 is a virus which causes Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) and the Human Immunodeficiency Virus causes AIDS. People often conflate parasites or viruses with the diseases they cause, and it's practically impossible to eliminate the diseases without eliminating the causative agent, but they are technically distinct concepts.

JohnMunsch 9mo ago

Hey, let's not be defeatist. Give RFK Jr. a shot at it and we can bring it roaring back.

Tagbert 9mo ago
We know that he’s very pro-worm
- ThrowawayTestr 9mo ago
  What are you talking about? Dude loves ivermectin.

ufocia 9mo ago

Kudos, but it seems that "eradicated" is a bit too strong of a word, since it appears that the worm will still be capable of infecting new patients.

rozab 9mo ago

>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? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_Effect

rincebrain 9mo ago
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.

MrGuts 9mo ago

Quick! Someone please call the HHS Secretary and have funding for this program cut to the bone!