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 Carter urges Sudan ceasefire to eradicate Guinea worm
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Carter urges Sudan ceasefire to eradicate worm
KHARTOUM, Feb 4 (Reuters) - Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter urged the warring parties in Sudan on Monday to declare a nationwide ceasefire to back a project to eradicate the debilitating Guinea worm disease.
Sudan has around 50,000 sufferers from about 80 percent of all the world's cases, but experts say eradication would be a matter of a few years if health workers were given proper access.
In 1995, Carter negotiated a similar ceasefire which lasted several months, allowing health teams into affected areas. But fighting in Africa's largest country flared again afterwards.
"In my prayers to God, I appeal to the government and the SPLM/SPLA (rebel group) to show wisdom and generosity, and as a first step to eradicating Guinea worm, they should announce a nationwide and complete ceasefire," he said at the start of a four-day conference in Khartoum on wiping out the infestation.
Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir said his government backed the idea of a ceasefire to help health workers, and urged the international community to put pressure on the rebel movement to do the same.
Carter said he would be travelling to the rebel-held town of Rumbek in southern Sudan to meet Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) leaders to discuss peace efforts and health issues.
Rebels have been fighting since 1983 for greater autonomy for the mostly Christian and animist south from successive governments in the Muslim north. Some two million people have died as a result of the conflict.
U.S. special envoy John Danforth recently secured a ceasefire deal in the Nuba Mountains of southern Sudan, but there have been reports of violations, and fighting continues elsewhere in the country. Carter now ######### the U.S.-based Carter Center, which leads a project to stamp out Guinea worm disease.
Sudan's national coordinator for Guinea worm eradication, Nabil Aziz, said that of the more than 49,000 cases reported in Sudan, 99 percent were in the south.
People catch the disease by drinking water infested with the larvae. The worm, which is about as thick as a spaghetti noodle, can grow to about three feet (over a metre) long inside the body. After a year, it emerges through an agonisingly painful blister in the skin.
Carter told Reuters last week that even if he could arrange a ceasefire throughout Sudan, it would take at least three years to stamp out every last case of the disease. All other countries hoped to wipe out the illness by 2004, he said.
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