A Picture Can Tell 1000 Words

And so I choose not to include any photos for this post. Google Guinea Worm and you’ll see why. It makes my skin crawl. These worms have now (unofficially) been eradicated from Ghana, and I’m so happy that I came at such a time.

Guinea worm is a parasite found in water, that when ingested, will start to grow inside you. It hangs out for a while, then starts to exit your skin, in the most painful of ways. These are the images you’ll see. The worm comes out of any part of the body, yet anyone is yet to see it come out the eyeball. My driver exclaimed the most painful Guinea Worm experience for him was when it came out his balls. He also offered it even “comes out from where you poo-poo”. He had many Guinea Worm and offered to show me his scars… Based on the afore mentioned suggestions, I declined.

The worm takes about a month to come out entirely. Each day you wrap it around a stick a little bit more. It’s extremely painful and can be debilitating. I heard the best way for it to come out is the nipple because it can come out in a day. When it is coming out it creates really hot pain, so relief is found when immersing your wound in water. But this is the worst thing you can do. As soon as the worm touches water it spawns, infecting the entire water supply. This can mean entire communities’ water supply. Starting the whole cycle again of ingestion and infection again.

It’s a big achievement to have it eradicated, and it was not an easy process. Included in the campaign was a reward of GHc200 (about AUD$110) for anyone who was found to have the worm. This was to help treat infected water, prevent recurrence and track the cases. But some desperate families made their children drink infected water so they could get the reward. Luckily this could not go on for long, as the water would soon be treated, however it’s an awful consequence of a campaign with best intentions.

Water cloth filters were created and given to communities to help filter out the drinking water. My first encounter with these was when I saw them being used to filter soy bean husks from soya milk! But they can create safe drinking water from any source. Chemicals treat dams and other preventative methods are used. 

When for 1 year there were no new cases, a fabric was made to celebrate, with Guinea Worms all over it! 

So Ghana is now Guinea Worm free. But the stories are still everywhere. Scars are everywhere. And luckily clean water is now everywhere.

Did you Google Image it??