Medical assault on the three-foot Guinea worm of Sudan

Scars on Severion Wayet's arms reveal where the flesh-burrowing Guinea worms burst through her skin.

It was an agonising process that lasted days as the worms, measuring around one metre (three feet) in length, fought their way out of her body.

Her village of Lojura, a remote settlement in the hot, dusty bush of south Sudan's Central Equatoria state, already has enough to deal with following a brutal civil war that ended just five years ago.

But it is also one of the world's worst areas for Guinea worm.

Also known as dracunculiasis, from the Latin for "little dragons", the worm is a particularly painful water-borne parasite that can leave people weakened and sick for months every year.

Spread by contaminated drinking water, the worm larvae grow into wriggling creatures up to a metre in length, and mate inside the human body.After about a year, the white worms dig through the body towards the skin, releasing chemicals to burn the flesh and then spewing thousands of larvae as they exit.

The Carter Centre - the not-for-profit organisation founded by former US president Jimmy Carter - has been working in Sudan since 1989 to exterminate the worm once and for all.

He said that when they started their project in southern Sudan they found more than 100,000 cases of infection.

"Last year we had about 2,500 cases, and we believe that in the next two or three years we will have zero cases of Guinea worm in Sudan," he said during a mid-February visit to Lojura where he met worm-infected villagers.
Infections worldwide have been cut by 99 per cent from around 3.9 million people in 1986 to 3,500 in 2009, according to the World Health Organisation.

Now the worms are found only in small and isolated pockets of Ghana, Mali and Ethiopia, with its final main stronghold in grossly underdeveloped south Sudan.

Medical experts believe that it would be possible to eradicate Guinea worm within a few years.

"When we succeed," Carter said, "this will be the second disease in history ever eradicated from the face of the earth - the only other one was smallpox now almost 20 years ago."

Although there is no direct treatment, the breeding cycle can be broken by making sure people do not wash in sources of drinking water while the worm is emerging from the skin.

Moreover, thousands of volunteer health workers have been trained to ensure people use a simple water filter for drinking potentially unsafe water.

Many in the community here wear a water filter tube around their neck, and Carter predicted that Guinea worm would be the first disease to be wiped out without the use of a vaccine or medicine.

Worms mainly exit from the legs and arms but affected communities say they have been known to emerge from the head, sexual organs and even the eyes.
Eradicating it would have a major impact.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/expatnews/7256179/Medical-assault-on-the-three-...