What is the connection between The Carter Center and this year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine?
The prize went to the researchers, William C. Campbell, Satoshi Omura, and Youyou Tu, who discovered drugs that The Carter Center and others use to treat people for malaria, river blindness and lymphatic filariasis (elephantiasis).
The Carter Center congratulated the winners for their work and for preventing millions of people from suffering.
The drug therapies the researchers helped create “have revolutionized the treatment of some of the most devastating parasitic diseases,” the Nobel Committee said.
Campbell and Omura developed Avermectin, the parent of Ivermectin, a medicine used to treat parasitic diseases such as river blindness and elephantiasis, which can cause massive swelling of legs and lower body parts.
The Carter Center has been distributing Mectizan, Merck’s brand of the drug, which the company donates, to treat those two diseases for nearly 20 years. With The Carter Center providing much of the push, river blindness has nearly been eliminated in Central and South America.
Mexico just joined the countries in which the disease was declared gone, with the country’s Secretary of Health Dr. Mercedes Juan Lopez announcing it Sept. 29.
Former President Jimmy Carter said at the time, “Today, four of the six river blindness-endemic countries in the Americas have eliminated transmission of the disease, but I am not ready to celebrate until the task is complete.”
The center is also playing a central role in carrying the fight against river blindness to Africa, where more than 120 million people are at risk and hundreds of thousands have been blinded. It is also working on eliminating malaria from the Dominican Republic, the last place where the disease is found the Caribbean.
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