Novartis wants to raise about $1 billion annually for 10 years to create a fund that companies and institutions could draw on to develop treatments for diseases that get little drug-development interest because they wouldn’t be profitable. The US and European governments, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust have all apparently been approached without success.

Paul Herrling, head of Novartis corporate research says, “It’s two years I’ve been working on this thing, and I don’t have a cent”.

It is necessary for at least three years to pass without notification of a case before WHO will certify a country as being guinea worm free. As recently reported on TropIKA.net, over a year has gone by since a case was seen in Nigeria. Neighbouring Niger is in a similar position. WHO considers that both nations have interrupted transmission and it is hoped that they are well on the way towards elimination of the disease.

Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali and Sudan are the four remaining ountries where transmission has yet to be interrupted.

Further details are available in a WHO press note.

The US Carter Center which has been at the heart of guinea worm eradication efforts says there have been no known cases since November 2008. According to the Center, the last person to have had the disease (a villager in the southeast of the country) has become a “minor celebrity”.

Two more years must pass without further cases before Nigeria is officially accredited as being free of the disease. Nevertheless, the achievement of the eradication efforts, which began in 1988, have been nothing short of astonishing. According to 1987 figures, there were 650,000 guinea worm cases in some 6,000 villages across Nigeria.

Nigeria joins 15 other countries that have rid themselves of Guinea worm disease since 1986. It is estimated that in 2009, fewer than 3,500 cases of the disease remain in four African countries: Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali and Sudan. It has hard to believe that just 20 years ago the total number of cases worldwide was approaching three million.

In Ghana there have been calls for opinion leaders to support community-based surveillance volunteers who are a key part of the plan to eradicate the disease there by 2014 - see Ghana News Agency report.

A recent report on Afrika.com notes that it is now six years since Uganda had any cases; WHO’s country director there has handed over an official certificate saying the coutry is guinea worm free.

Eradication was first claimed in 2006 but then new cases were found. However, a report on the Next website quotes Gowon as saying, “Available records have shown that there is zero case of the spread of the disease in Nigeria, though more than 650,000 guinea worm cases were discovered across the country in 1987.”

The Yakubu Gowon Centre has worked with the US Carter Center in efforts to eradicate the disease in Nigeria.

Speaking on National Guinea Worm Day, former Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon, said, “By the end of this year, we will have been one year free of reported cases, which leaves us with the challenges of achieving three years of active and intensive surveillance before certification by WHO [as a country that has eliminated the disease].” The progress made underscored the importance of an effective and efficient surveillance system. General Gowon said, “Unless this is given high priority, we stand the risk of re-infection and a reversal of all the gains so far made”.

Minister of Health Professor Babatunde Oshotimehin, explained that the fight against guinea worm in Nigeria began in 1988, when there were 650,623 reported cases of the disease in 5,978 villages across the country. Last year’s 38 cases were confined to one area of the country and that outbreak appears to have been contained. Read the full story in Vanguard Online.

A Voice of America report from a couple of months previously also makes interesting viewing.

Nevertheless, the most comprehensive TV coverage of the infectious diseases of poverty remains that from the BBC’s Survival series - see our article here on TropIKA.net.

If efforts to eradicate guinea worm disease succeed (and there is indeed encouraging progress to report), then it will also mean the eradication of the guinea worm itself. The ‘Save the Guinea Worm Foundation’ seems to be alarmed at this prospect.

The authors of this website say that they are not too upset that a virus had to be wiped out in order to eradicate smallpox but that to deliberately render extinct a higher life form (the guinea worm) is a step too far. They claim that malnutrition and toxins are in any case the real culprits responsible for dracunculiasis. (Another blogger says this exposes the Foundation as a piece of satire, as similar absurd claims are routinely made by AIDS denialists.)

But read the Foundation’s website for yourself. Perhaps you would like to join their band of volunteers willing to host guinea worms in order to save the species? Alternatively, you may prefer to read a recent press release from UNICEF, which outlines the valuable work being done in Niger to combat dranculiasis.