Saving Lives, One Village at a Time
By Laurie Morrissey
It was the end of a long, hot day of walking from one dusty village to another in the Sahel region of Niger, on the border of the Sahara Desert. By locating every drinking water source in the area, Monique Petrofsky ’83 and workers from the country’s Ministry of Health hoped to alleviate the enormous suffering caused by the Guinea worm parasite. After a long conversation in the mud hut of a local chief, they were ready to call it a day. Then they learned of one outlying water source they had not yet been to.
At Petrofsky’s urging, the exhausted team trekked through the desert and arrived at a stagnant water hole where five women stood hauling water for their families. As Petrofsky suspected, all had Guinea worm disease, a widespread parasitic infection in many African countries. The worm grows to as much as three feet long in its host’s body and emerges over a two-to-three- month period from an agonizing blister, usually on the foot or leg. The effects extend to the entire community: a critically ill woman cannot carry water, and a disabled farmer cannot plant food for his family.
"We saw paths leading in various directions from the water source to villages," recalls Petrofsky, a nurse epidemiologist with the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS). "The next day we followed every path and found more than 40 cases. It was real epidemiology—finding the source of infected water and going on foot to find the cases and stop transmission."
It was a defining moment in Petrofsky’s 20-year career: "my John Snow moment," as she calls it. Snow was the 19th century physician who traced a London cholera outbreak to a public water pump. Legend has it that when the handle was removed, the epidemic declined—evidence that contaminated water caused disease.
Guinea worm disease is devastating, yet it can be reduced by basic measures—education and the use of a simple cloth or nylon filter. If Petrofsky and others working through the Atlanta-based Carter Center succeed in eradicating it from the world—a goal now within reach—it will be the first disease to be wiped out without use of a vaccine. The Carter Center and its partners, including the USPHS, have reduced cases by more than 99.5 percent, from an estimated 3.5 million in 1986 to 10,674 reported in 2005.
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