![]() “He sometimes is so excited about things, he can’t speak fast enough. He calls the worm his “pet” and whimsically named it Henrietta.Ī colleague once called Hopkins a “congenital optimist.” “To me, he always seems on the edge of excitability,” says William Foege, MPH ’65, a former CDC director and himself a public health legend for having devised the immunization strategy that conquered smallpox. On a bookshelf in his home office, in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago, he keeps an alcohol-filled jar with a Guinea worm coiled at the bottom, extracted in the 1980s from a patient in Burkina Faso in Africa. Only a few years ago did he acquire his first cell phone. Hopkins hates distractions and lives a technologically austere life, spurning what he calls “the burden of email” (messages are forwarded from his longtime administrative assistant at the Carter Center, and he replies to messages via the same indirect route, often in two or three words). ![]() He is trim, bald, bespectacled, of middling height, and his voice is notably mild. Even his appearance is efficiently inconspicuous. As Hopkins once remarked, “I marvel that people stay sane.”įor virtually his entire adulthood, Hopkins has streamlined every aspect of his life for the higher calling of eradicating Guinea worm. Of course, he was in misery.” In 1999, a young farmer in Nigeria named Abdullahi Rabiu set a horrifying world record: 84 Guinea worms removed from his body. It looked as if somebody had thrown a handful of spaghetti at him. And the health worker was teasing out strands of Guinea worms, which are sort of ivory-colored. “That person starved to death,” he says, “because it was too painful for him to swallow.” In the late 1990s, Hopkins visited a clinic in Ghana where a health worker was winding multiple worms out of a man’s body. Hopkins knows of a case where the worm emerged from under a man’s tongue. One of the more torturous aspects of Guinea worm disease is that the worm can surface anywhere in the body: usually the feet or legs but also the head, the chin, the genitals, the eyes. The photo transfixed him: a long, slender, pale worm erupting from a woman’s arm. The first time that Hopkins saw a Guinea worm was in 1958, in a college zoology textbook. ![]() Hopkins is one of them.” A village in Nigeria bestowed on Hopkins the title “Healer of the World.”īut 26 cases is not zero, and for Hopkins, zero is the only number that counts. Former President Jimmy Carter, who in 1986 brought diplomatic and financial muscle to Hopkins’ endeavor, said, “There have been few heroes in my life, and Dr. He was awarded a MacArthur “genius” fellowship. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), then at the Atlanta-based Carter Center, a nongovernmental organization with a human rights focus-Hopkins has been showered with accolades. Horrifying world record: 84 Guinea worms removed from his body.Īs Donald Hopkins once remarked, “I marvel that people stay sane.”įor steadfastly piloting this public health crusade-first at the U.S. In 1999, a young farmer in Nigeria named Abdullahi Rabiu set a ![]() As of October 2017, there were 26 cases on the planet, all in Chad and Ethiopia. Today, the infection is endemic in only four countries: Chad, Ethiopia, Mali, and South Sudan. In 1986, when the first global eradication project was launched, there were an estimated 3.5 million cases in 21 countries across Africa and Asia. The counterforces of skepticism and scarce funding-but mainly what Hopkins calls “a failure of imagination”-have stymied the effort. Hopkins thought Guinea worm would prove equally susceptible over a similar time frame, that removing it by 1995 from its natural haunts-stagnant water in impoverished and marginalized locales-would be a “piece of cake.” In the late 1960s, he had helped lead the successful campaign to eradicate smallpox, one of the greatest killers in human history the campaign took just 14 years, from 1966 to 1980. In the 38 years since then, the worldwide campaign to eradicate this nightmare infection has pretty much hewed to Hopkins’ middle-of-the-night inspiration.Īlthough he hadn’t yet turned 40, Hopkins, MPH ’70, was an old hand at monumental public health pursuits. Two or three pages later, Hopkins had sketched a first draft of a comprehensive battle plan against a nearly lifelong nemesis: Guinea worm disease-one of the most gruesome afflictions known to humankind, but also one of the most preventable. He turned on the light, closed the door, sat down on a towel, and began furiously scribbling. Hopkins crept out of bed and tiptoed to the bathroom. His wife, Ernestine, was sleeping soundly beside him. He reached toward the nightstand and grabbed a pen and a ruled notepad-items that are always within reach-and pulled back the covers. It was sometime after 2 a.m., early October 1980, at the old Hotel Chantilly, in Geneva.
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