Guinea Worm Disease Hits All-Time Low: Just 10 Human Cases in 2025

On 30 January 2026, The Carter Center announced a historic provisional figure: just 10 human cases of Guinea worm disease were reported worldwide in 2025, the fewest ever recorded. The 10 cases were spread across three countries — four each in Chad and Ethiopia, and two in South Sudan — and mark a 33 percent decline from the 15 cases counted in 2024.

The scale of the long-term progress is hard to overstate. When The Carter Center took leadership of the eradication campaign in 1986, an estimated 3.5 million human cases occurred each year across 21 countries in Africa and Asia. The drop to 10 cases represents a reduction of more than 99.99 percent. Guinea worm is now poised to become only the second human disease ever eradicated, after smallpox, and the first to be wiped out without any medicine or vaccine.

“The 10 cases were spread across three countries — four each in Chad and Ethiopia, and two in South Sudan — and mark a 33 percent decline from the 15 cases counted in 2024.”

What makes the campaign remarkable is its method. Guinea worm spreads when people drink water containing tiny crustaceans carrying larvae; about a year later, a meter-long worm slowly emerges through the skin. There is no drug to kill it and no shot to prevent it. Eradication has relied entirely on community health education, water filtration, case containment and the patient work of tens of thousands of local volunteers across remote villages.

Caution remains warranted. Cases in animals — particularly dogs in Chad — have complicated the final push, and conflict in places like South Sudan can disrupt surveillance. The provisional 2025 count must still be confirmed, and even a handful of cases can seed new infections if monitoring lapses. But the trajectory is unmistakable. Decades of grassroots persistence have brought an ancient parasite, described in Egyptian records thousands of years old, to the very edge of disappearing from the planet entirely.