I won't stand for Carter slander: he was a darn good president too. What he wasn't good at, was politicking, and that was because he also was a good man, to a fault. He gave an honest answer to a question on if he had ever lusted after a woman who was not his wife, and reaped a scandal.

He's helicopter crash away from being remembered as a daring wartime president.

Pretty good president overall. Too bad he told America what they didn’t want to hear, like they had to make tradeoffs regarding energy use.

I just listened to a the rest is history podcast and he had a few things he was lacking and wasn’t particularly flattering but he was an upstanding citizen at the very least.

_"a lie has no legs *_ the guinea worm neither..

As you might expect from the description -- largely passed on via contaminated water -- the guinea worm is mostly present in areas of extreme poverty. Even if such a treatment were feasible, it would be inaccessible to most of the relevant population.

Not a stupid question at all, it's actually quite logical thinking. Here's why it's not that straightforward: The worm is extremely fragile. Guinea worms can be up to a meter long but are very thin and delicate. When you pull too quickly or forcefully, the worm breaks. This is the central problem — it's not like a catheter or guide wire, which are engineered to have tensile strength. The worm's body is essentially a thin biological tube filled with millions of larvae. Breaking it is the real danger. When the worm ruptures, it releases those larvae and bodily fluids into the surrounding tissue, triggering a severe inflammatory reaction, secondary bacterial infection, and sometimes abscess formation or sepsis. This is far worse than the worm itself. So the traditional slow winding onto a stick (a few centimeters per day) works with the worm's own gradual release from the tissue it's embedded in. The path isn't a clean channel. Unlike a blood vessel, which is a defined, smooth lumen, the worm sits winding through subcutaneous connective tissue. It doesn't create a neat tunnel — it's loosely embedded and adhered to surrounding tissue along its length. There's no "pipe" to snake a tool through. A catheter in a blood vessel follows a pre-existing anatomical highway; here there's no such structure. Surgical extraction is sometimes attempted, but it requires carefully dissecting along the entire worm's path without rupturing it — which is technically demanding, time-consuming, and requires facilities and skills that are often unavailable in the rural sub-Saharan communities where the disease occurs. For a worm that may wind through 30–60 cm of tissue, that's a significant operation for a condition that, while painful, is usually self-limiting. The real solution turned out to be prevention. The Carter Center's eradication campaign brought cases from ~3.5 million per year in the 1980s to fewer than 15 per year now, almost entirely through water filtration and education — making the surgical question largely moot. So in short: the worm isn't strong enough to pull, the path isn't clean enough to navigate, breaking it makes everything worse, and the settings where it occurs rarely have the surgical capacity for careful dissection.

Anaphylactic shock, and possibly death, is a potential outcome from the worm breaking internally. Far too risky.

> Ivermectin is a very good dewormer!

And that may be responsible for some false positives in ivermectin studies for COVID - if a patient has a parasitic infection as well as COVID, treating the parasites will improve their outcome.

True. But you can't get a prescription for the human version unless you actually have worms. So if you're taking it for some other reason, you're probably getting the version for horses, which you can buy by the bucket.

The media knowingly repeated “horse dewormer” because it made people they don’t like look dumb.

Anything that annihilates bed bugs is a net positive to the world. Drinking poison out of spite for those sons of the devil is well within reason. To hell with those infralings.

What are you talking about? Dude loves ivermectin.

It has been done for snakes. Nobody minds you have a snake farm and sell them to the government. Neighbors may even sell you captured mices.

On the other hand, infecting the children at the school will make everyone go to your house, probably burn it and hit you until you are rescued by the police. Did I mention the local police chief has nephew in the school?

Somehow it seems to have worked here. There's probably a bit more to the secret sauce.

You then create a bigger bounty to identify the entrepreneurs, and now it's bounties all the way down.

500 SSP is about 4 USD. If you have the ability to come up with the scheme, you can do better with pretty much anything else.

Come on. It's 2026: I, Pencil isn't a mic drop. It's a cliche. It's 70 years old, assume everyone's read it.

Also, your drop of it betrays a pretty fundamental lack of understanding. I stand by my statement that free market could never accomplish something like this. Eradicating a disease is nothing like a business making a pencil to sell.

There's no such thing as the "free market". It's a foolish propaganda term to try and assign people's actions to a philosophy they don't care about.

> Consider what you might choose to do…

Emphasis on might.

Evidence suggests "a giant boat and some helicopters" is the more likely result.

Is there evidence that it happens? And that it serves the public good, not the personal interests of the wealthy? Do we need another $100 million given to a health program accessible only to the wealthy, or funding for public health? To a business school or art museum, or to arts programs for public schools?

Philanthropy is anti-democratic; the people don't choose what is important to support, the wealthy few do. You can see that in the relatively poor public goods in the US, which has much lower taxes relative to peers.

Well my taxes go to roads, healthcare for people who can’t afford, schools, and the fire department. I would consider those public goods.

Which 30% are you talking about? Taxes? If so: From what do you build things like infrastructure?

Lol, the reaction that you are getting to your post...

They sure have a pretty dim view of their fellow humans while paradoxically believing in the goodness of the gubberment.

One tiny correction to your post. While it's true that most income tax is in the region of 30%, the cumulative taxes would be of the order of 60% of what of what one could potentially earn. Cumulative taxes = income + payroll+ property taxes etc.

The billionaires out there are being revealed as paedophiles quicker than they are solving world health problems.

I’d prefer not to rely on them.

> Consider how many more philanthropists would be created by returning this 30% back to individual discernment.

Many, many fewer than you assume.

Libertarians like to make lots of good-sounding promises to justify their favored radical policy, but it's bullshit and the promises don't pan out when tested [1]. By that point, the libertarian has gotten what he wanted and moved on.

[1] Or their policy was already tried and already failed, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46876387, leading to reforms to fix the problems that they're now mad about and want to undo.

A lot less because they'd be dead from easily preventable diseases in their water supply?

And (weirdly, I think) a few years back they called alcoholism and smoking diseases, which, well, really??

Few cases is good, but if there are any, the whole machinery of surveillance, treatment, and education has to be in place. As soon as we reach 0 cases for a certain amount of time, all those resources can be redirected to other neglected tropical diseases that haven't been wiped out, like onchocerciasis, loa loa, yaws, lymphatic filariasis, trachoma, and all the others. Yaws in particular is a good candidate for eradication.

Are they just the known infected animals or is it an estimation of the total count of infected animals?

Those are bonkers (low) numbers compared to the 3.5M (human?) cases if I'm to believe the GPs comment.

It's also crazy how much Mother Theresa's quote rings true, even in reverse ("If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.") When I initially read 3.5M cases, I thought "wow, that's a lot", and somehow the 445 animal cases in Cameroon felt (at first) more real and similarly "a lot".

No comment other than interesting how our human brains work and distort how numbers "feel".

Once my rational brain kicked in, realized that's over 5,000 years for the current number of animal cases to match the former number of human cases. The future is awesome.

It was a somewhat recent discovery that there were animal reservoirs escaping detection. Carter had hoped to outlive the worm, but it was thought that the animal pools were going to make full eradication take an additional 20 years.

But the question would be how many more go undetected in those animals. (I.e if wild animals carry it, how accurate are these numbers).

How can you reliably eradicate it from wild animals? Sounds like an impossible task if there is no broad treatment we could put in the water or something.

You are right. Wikipedia write it is limited to dogs, cat and baboons, and that animal hosts have been only proved in the 2010s, so I guess they are unlikely to become infected by the parasite

Where in this thread is someone blaming god for anything? Who in this is atheist? What?

I think they imply that supposedly benevolent god created this horror incarnate that humans fixed.

Cultivating optimism is the first step. Optimism is irrational, you can just choose to have it (of course thinking about good things that have happened helps). Optimism is the precondition for doing good.

So what if there’s a low collective will at the moment. Do your part to be part to grow the collective will to good. Go volunteer for a good cause (food bank, community organizations, etc.), donate to good causes, just be friendly to other people you see.

> I am just increasingly pessimistic about our collective desire to do so.

It's not just a lack of desire (apathy). People who want to solve big, collective problems are increasingly up against groups who actively want to not solve the problems and/or make the problems worse. COVID, for example, was so much worse than it had to be, purely from people actively fighting efforts meant to contain it. Efforts to reverse or mitigate Climate Change are routinely and vigorously opposed.

For news about things that are going right, I suggest https://fixthenews.com/. You can get a free weekly email about progress in energy and the environment, national economies, health and medicine, crime etc (or pay for a longer weekly email).

As they say, pessimists sound smart, optimists get things done (and make money along the way, if that is the goal).

When the the only thing CEOs talk about for every new technology is how many people they are going to put out of work because of it, the collective desire for new technology and progress is understandably lessened.

That you have the mental capacity/structures/language to form the thought should indicate the trajectory you're caught up within. It's disappointing that everything not's resolved during the blip you're you but even a moderately long view provides evidence for optimism.

It will rewire the hard sacrifice of limiting individual wealth to less than a billion dollars per person. Trajectory of present indicates we won't be doing that soon.

Have you noticed you don't have Guinea Worms where you live?

It's trivial to not have this problem, the fact that a relatively large fraction of the world's population needed intervention to fix this is an indictment on our collective will.

You may have read, or at least heard about John Green's book "Everything is Tuberculosis". Treating TB is, by comparison to Guinea Worm, really hard. When medics tell John that - all being equal - nobody should die of TB because we could just fix it, they mean with like a hospital full of doctors to diagnose and prescribe treatment, pharmaceutical companies to make the drugs, stuff that looks like technology to you.

To eradicate Guinea Worm Disease you need basic clean water. I'm not talking "Wait, does this tap water meet current national standards for UV treatment?" clean water, I'm talking like, "don't drink directly out of the village pond" clean water. That's really what it takes for this to just go away on its own. The interventions are because crazily in 2026 large numbers of humans do not have ready access to clean drinking water.

Pessimism is not a uniquely American viewpoint.

"South Korea is second from bottom on our list in terms of the proportion of people saying their country “is heading in the right direction”, with only 15% stating so. A similar sentiment is also felt about the economy. Pessimism is usually the standard for South Korea; however, their economic indicator score has been particularly low in recent times, with just 8% believing the economy is “good”."

https://www.ipsos.com/en-ch/what-worries-world-may-2025?utm_...

OP, don’t post snarky comments on any platform. It’s not suited for most places.

Scientifically illiterate grifters would be better suited for roles other than head of HHS, but here we are, living in imperfect times.