Today, Jan. 9, is the Official State Funeral for President Jimmy Carter.

When he ran for President, I was excited because he studied nuclear physics and he served as the Senior Officer in the development and building of the USS Seawolf, the U.S.’s second nuclear submarine. I thought he would be a great President. Turns out he wasn’t. But, in my opinion, he turned out to be the best Ex-President since Teddy Roosevelt.

When he left office, he focused his attention on doing what he could to help those in need. Most know of his work with Habitat for Humanity, but I think his greatest achievement is his war on the Guinea worm.

This is a parasitic worm that you ingest through contaminated water. The worm lives as a small larvae in your body until it is mature and is ready to reproduce. At that time it grows into a two-foot long worm that makes its way under the skin to your ankles. This causes intense pain and to relieve the pain you place your foot in cool water. The worm breaks through the skin and lays millions of microscopic eggs in the water, thus further contaminating the water source.

The Guinea worm was once common all across Africa. One is preserved in a mummy of a 13-year old Egyptian girl that dates back 3,000 years. Some scholars believe it was the Guinea worms that were the “fiery serpents” that attacked the ankles of the fleeing Israelites during their 40-year journey through the desert. “Fiery” does describe the pain from the worm. Moses prayed to God and was given instructions to make a bronze serpent and set it on a pole.

The Israelites that looked upon the bronze serpent were cured.

Interestingly enough there is also a Greek legend of a god-like healer named Asclepius who is always pictured as holding a staff with a snake wrapped around it. The way to remove a Guinea worm is to cut into the skin at the worm’s head end. You wrap the worm around a stick and then slowly turn the stick and pull the worm out. If you go too fast it breaks and infection sets in. Some believe that Asclepius came up with this method of removing the worm and that the snake on Asclepius’s staff was actually a worm.

In 1986, Jimmy Carter directed the “Carter Center” to focus on ridding the world of this parasite. That year there were over 3.5 million known cases of Dracunculiasis, a term meaning “affliction with little dragons”.

Last year there were only 13!

This was a disease common to rural isolated villages in Africa where clean water was a problem. The Carter Center has been working now for 38+ years educating the people of these isolated villages about the importance of boiling and/or filtering their water so as to not take in the larval form of the worm which lives in a microscopic animal we call a “cyclops”.

We have the microscopic cyclops in the waters around Gothenburg, but we don’t have Guinea worms.

Now, because of Jimmy Carter’s work, soon, no one else will either!