Guinea Worm Disease Reaches All-Time Low With Just 10 Cases in 2025

The Carter Center announced on 30 January 2026 that just 10 human cases of Guinea worm disease were reported worldwide in 2025 — the lowest annual figure ever recorded. The provisional number marks a 33% decline from the 15 cases reported in 2024 and brings one of humanity’s oldest afflictions closer than ever to eradication.

The scale of the progress is hard to overstate. When The Carter Center took the lead of the global eradication campaign in 1986, an estimated 3.5 million people were infected each year across 21 countries in Africa and Asia. Reaching just 10 cases represents a reduction of more than 99.99%, and the campaign is estimated to have averted more than 100 million cases over the decades. In 2025 the remaining cases were concentrated in just three countries: four in Chad, four in Ethiopia and two in South Sudan.

“The provisional number marks a 33% decline from the 15 cases reported in 2024 and brings one of humanity’s oldest afflictions closer than ever to eradication.”

Guinea worm has no vaccine and no medicine to cure it. Progress has come instead from patient, community-based public health: teaching people to filter drinking water, containing cases so larvae are not released back into water sources, and educating villages across some of the most remote regions on Earth. If the count reaches zero and stays there, Guinea worm would become only the second human disease ever eradicated, after smallpox.

“Zero is the only acceptable number, and that’s why our commitment to finishing this job is unwavering,” said Adam Weiss, director of the Carter Center Guinea Worm Eradication Program. The announcement came around the first anniversary of the death of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who made eradicating the disease a defining mission of his post-presidency. His life’s work now stands within reach of completion — a quiet triumph built not on a miracle drug, but on decades of trust, education and persistence.