Former President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn in a health clinic in Ouanaminthe, Haiti, October 2009. As President Obama and Congress work to overhaul American health care, Jimmy Carter is continuing his quest to fight diseases in some of the most neglected regions of the globe. Carter turned 85 in October; to celebrate, he flew to Hispaniola with his wife, Rosalynn, to check in on the Carter Center’s efforts to eliminate malaria in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. On the phone from his home in Plains, Georgia, Carter spoke with Vanity Fair recently about battling disease in countries plagued by strife, working together with the pharmaceutical industry, and what the American health care system could learn from his travels in places like Africa, Latin America, and South Asia. Austin Merrill: What’s your response to critics who say that eliminating malaria or other diseases is unrealistic, inefficient, and even irresponsible due to the funds such efforts might siphon from general health care administration? Jimmy Carter: We don’t consider those criticisms to be justified. We probably have the finest health experts on Earth, and they work intimately with the Task Force for Disease Eradication at the Carter Center. They have all agreed that this is a good and worthy target. Malaria is one of three diseases, along with AIDS and Tuberculosis, that gets funding from the Global Fund. And it’s natural for us, if we are going to tackle malaria, to include Lymphatic Filariasis, because both diseases are transmitted by mosquitoes, which are killed by the long lasting insecticidal nets that we give people to hang over their beds. We hope to have the medicines for these diseases contributed by pharmaceutical companies. And I think the budget for the program is quite reasonable—something like a dollar per person per year. The most prominent disease that we have addressed—almost unilaterally—is Dracuncaliasis, or Guinea Worm. Since 1986 we have reduced the number of Guinea Worm cases from 3.5 million, in 20 countries, to less than 5,000 today in just a handful of countries. And we’ve done this by going into 23,600 villages to tell people what they themselves can do to control the disease. Others that we address are Trachoma, which is the number one cause of preventable blindness, and River Blindness, which is caused by the bite of a little black fly.
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