Outside the main entrance of the World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva stands a bronze statue of an African boy walking ahead of his blinded father, guiding him with a long stick they both hold.
This poignant artwork depicts how onchocerciasis, an ancient disease commonly known as river blindness, impacts many of the world’s poorest people. Several replicas have been installed around the world, including notably at the Carter Presidential Center in Atlanta, Georgia.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
The statue conveys many things: service, hope, the pride possessed by people who many see as vulnerable. Above all, it underscores how access to health is essential to enable each of us to live with dignity, no matter income or birthplace.
President Jimmy Carter, with whom I was privileged to have worked closely for two decades, embodied and championed all this and more. While attending services in Washington D.C. celebrating President Carter’s life, I will pay tribute to the lasting legacies he left with the partnerships and programs that protect millions from the global threats of disease and war.
President Carter saw afflictions such as river blindness, malaria and Guinea-worm disease as debilitating drivers of and results of poverty and insecurity. In the 1980s, about 3.5 million people in Africa and Asia lived with Guinea-worm disease, a debilitating condition with no vaccine or treatment. It is caused by drinking stagnant water infected by parasites that, once ingested, grow into long worms that burrow, painfully, out of the patient’s body through their skin.
President Carter understood this disease preyed on the world’s poorest people. But he believed it could be fought with strategies owned by affected communities and countries and implemented with simple tools. In this case, a filter to separate the parasites from collected drinking water at the source.
In 1986, the World Health Assembly called for the disease’s eradication. The Carter Center, which the president founded with his late wife, Rosalynn, and Emory University, would play a leading role. It supported heads of state and health departments in affected countries, and collaborated with global partners, including WHO, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Gates Foundation, to mobilize needed resources.
Since 2000, the disease has been eliminated from Southeast Asia, with only about a dozen reported cases today in Africa. Global eradication is in sight, a result that ranks as one of President Carter’s most important postpresidential achievements.
I met President Carter during his visit to inspect the health projects his center was supporting in Ethiopia. I was serving as minister of health. What impressed me then and the many times we met after was his humility and commitment to service. He strategically leveraged his position as a president of the United States to open doors to governments around the world and help build country-led solutions.
That meeting in Addis Ababa, some 20 years ago, was immensely important personally. It started a close relationship, built on shared goals of achieving health for all, respecting individual dignity and human rights, and pursuing peace. I was humbled in 2011 to be the first non-American recipient of the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Humanitarian Award. I also appreciated the president’s support of my campaign to become the first African elected director-general of WHO.
The impact the Carters have had on people’s well-being extends to mental health. Their Center has drafted policy, reduced stigma and raised the importance of mental health in the United States and beyond. In 2023, first lady Carter was presented with the WHO Award for Global Health to recognize her lifetime achievement in working on mental health issues.
Importantly, President Carter recognized the links between health and peace. The Carter Center, he once said, “Always considered peace and health to be interrelated. The right of people to live in peace and the right of people to have adequate health care, and to have their children survive, are inseparable basic rights of a human being.”
By bringing Egypt and Israel together to forge the historic Camp David Accords and the resulting 1979 peace deal, he showed it is possible to end war and build secure futures for people tired of conflict. The need for this in the Middle East today has never been stronger.
In 1995, during Sudan’s civil war, President Carter astutely negotiated a six-month cease-fire to give health workers the space and security to undertake Guinea-worm disease, river blindness and other health programs.
During and after his presidency, President Carter also demonstrated the political and moral leadership of the United States over and over again, and its role in advancing global security, collaboration and health to protect everyone in America and around the world.
These examples and more are prescient for today’s volatile world.
The divide between rich and poor has never been wider, nor has wealth been so concentrated in the hands of so few. And the perils we collectively face — wars, outbreaks and climate change — have never felt more pressing. But President Carter’s example as a leader, a humanitarian and a human can guide us through these unclear times. I urge us all to follow his lead.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is director-general of the World Health Organization.
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