'The President and the Dragon' follows Jimmy Carter's journey to eradicate an ancient parasite

Caption

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter tries to comfort 6-year-old Ruhama Issah at Savelugu Hospital in Ghana as a Carter Center technical assistant dresses Issah's extremely painful Guinea worm wound in 2007.

Credit: Carter Center

The President and the Dragon offers an insider’s glimpse into the Carter Center's efforts to rid the world of Guinea worm disease, and the film airs on GPB TV beginning Nov. 3. It was released during a celebration on Oct. 1 at the Carter Center on what would have been Jimmy Carter's 101st birthday.

The documentary is a serpent-slaying adventure with former President Jimmy Carter as its superhero. But it also features the voices of doctors, scientists and "Guinea worm heroes" who helped conquer this ancient parasite and continue to pursue Carter's mission of complete eradication.

 “Slay” is not a word used often in the public health sphere, but it the verb of choice for tackling the horrific organism, which is ingested through contaminated water and grows inside the human body for up to year before emerging, sometimes feet long, through the skin, causing its human host excruciating pain.  

And during the last decades of his life, Carter became known as "worm slayer" for his tireless work to defeat this fiery serpent in every corner of the earth.

Carter died last December, and former first lady Rosalynn Carter died in Nov. 2023, but the Carter Center’s work to end Guinea worm disease continues. 

The President and the Dragon follows the timeline of the Center's eradication efforts,  which took the number of cases from roughly 3,500,000 in the late 1980s to single digits today. (See GPB's illustrated timeline of Carter's work here.)

Dr. Donald Hopkins served as VP of health programs at the Carter Center and deputy director of the CDC. He told GPB he first became aware of Guinea worm disease in a biology textbook when he was a student at Morehouse College. "It was my sophomore year, and we were looking at things, I remember just being struck then by how dramatic that disease was."

He said the first time he saw the work was while working with colleagues at CDC in October 1980. 

"And then, I think it was about 1982 when I went to India to a Guinea warn meeting, and that was when I first saw the disease in the flesh, as it were," Hopkins said. "But of course, I've seen many more people infected, especially in Africa, since then. But it's humbling and frightening and exasperating to see people still suffering from that disease in this day and time."

The Carter Center convened a meeting in 1986 to pledge its support in the fight against the neglected disease.

"President Carter came and spent two and a half hours personally there that afternoon at that meeting," he recalled. "There's a plaque in that room now, in fact, to commemorate that momentous meeting. But that's where it happened, and that's when it first began to happen at the Carter Center. "

Caption

Dr. Donald Hopkins demonstrates how to use a pipe filter to prevent Guinea worm disease in Molujore, South Sudan.

Credit: Carter Center

From that point on, President and Mrs. Carter brokered a Guinea Worm Ceasefire during Sudan’s Civil War in 1995 and traveled to several African nations to set programs in motion.

Adam Weiss is the Director of the Guinea Worm Eradication program at the Carter Center and started as a technical advisor in 2005 after serving in the Peace Corps.

"I think when I first showed up to my village in northern Ghana called Pishigu, there were about a hundred people that had Guinea worm that year," he told GPB. "I will say firmly, I didn't really think it could be done because there were just so many cases. And while we understood the science, when you see science sometimes in real life you don't actually think it all adds up, and so I wasn't convinced. But the next year, when there were no cases of Guinea worm, I was convinced!"

Part of the success of the Guinea worm program is its reliance on behavioral change to include new habits such as filtering water through a special sieve or straw, Weiss said.

"And they would tie it around the reed, or like a piece of bamboo or thick grass, and they actually use it like a straw," he said. "And so the Carter Center, with other partners, were able to then manufacture those at a very low cost, less than a dollar, and distribute millions of them around the world in these endemic communities."

Caption

Former first lady Rosalynn Carter pictured greeting Ghanaian children during a February 2007 Carter Center trip to Ghana.

Credit: Carter Center

One of the most dramatic changes shown in The President and the Dragon occurred in the then new country of South Sudan, which has reached near-eradication.

Makoy Samuel Yibi is Director of South Sudan’s Guinea worm program. He told GPB Carter’s efforts were wrapped up with the country’s pursuit of independence and peace.

"The life of South Sudanese was filled with darkness at the time," he said. "He provided that light into that darkness. And today we can call ourselves free because of the effort that he initiated in our country. I always say that President Carter loved everyone in the world, but I think he loved us more in South Sudan."

Dr. Margaret Itto said Carter’s visits to South Sudan helped the country get behind the eradication efforts.

"At that time, I was the State Minister of Health in Eastern Equatoria State, and we had three quarters of the 20,000 cases in our state," she said. "So... I'm very lucky to be from the state which held the biggest number of Guinea worms and to have been visited by Carter Center. And also here we are today [with one or two cases]... we believe we shall run to the end soon."

The Carter Center’s Emily Staub worked with Hopkins and the American Museum of Natural History on the award-winning Guinea worm exhibition "Countdown to Zero: Defeating Disease" and was one of the driving forces behind The President and the Dragon.

"In the documentary, you see a couple of places where he is not messing around," she said. "When he's in Ghana and we had a huge outbreak in Northern Ghana, he was furious. He was very laser focused, President Carter."

While nearly a year has passed since Jimmy Carter’s death, the determination he instilled in others hasn’t waned, Hopkins says.

"This disease has a one-year incubation period and there's no way around that," Hopkins said. "But we are continuing to squeeze this tighter and tighter. … And so it's a matter of time. You've just got to stay the course. And we're hell-bent on doing that."

Jason Carter, who chairs the Carter Center's board and is the eldest grandchild of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, said the documentary provides reasons for optimism even in divided times.

"It is a true, remarkable success story," he said. "It's about human connection and fighting disease by educating people and by having them come together. It sort of exemplifies Jimmy Carter in a host of ways."