Get up close with four presidents of the United States discussing some of their most personal causes. Former President Jimmy Carter sits down with Jon Stewart to explain his efforts to eradicate the harmful Guinea Worm. Former President Bill Clinton talks about his foundation's campaign to combat ebola. President Barack Obama joins Trevor Noah to unpack how to be authentic amidst the demands of the presidency. Then Senator Joe Biden talks to Jon about how he would approach the presidency, and what it means to him. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What innovative methods did Jimmy Carter use to eradicate the Guinea Worm?
Nice to see you. So here you are. Here's what I didn't realize. Okay, so you have this thing that you start in 1986. Right. Carter Center goes and they say, this guinea worm is a problem. Explain very quickly what it is, because I can't do it justice.
Guinea worm, if you drink water out of a filthy water hole, which fills up during the rainy season and then stays dry, it doesn't have any fresh water. Then you drink the guinea worm eggs, and in a year's time, it grows to a worm about 30 inches long. And then it stings the inside of your skin, epidermis, and then it creates a sore, a big sore, and then it emerges.
It takes you 30 days to come out, and it destroys muscle tissue and leaves you a cripple.
And terrible parts.
Oh, horrible pain, almost indescribable pain, yeah.
And this is, I have, they, a lot of times when a movie is coming out, they'll send me a little something like a Nerf ball with the name of the movie on it. Your people sent me a dead guinea worm. I bet it's dead, yeah. Can we get that over here? This is what it looks like. It looks like that is the thing that comes out of people's, oftentimes their feet, yes? Their feet or their toes? Feet, toes.
The first time I saw it, one was coming out of a nipple of a woman's breast. Unbelievable. And just terribly, terribly painful. Now, in 1986... When you begin this program, how many cases of guinea worm are occurring throughout? Where did it mostly have, Asia, Africa?
Three countries in Asia and 17 countries in Africa, sub-Saharan Africa. We found guinea worm in 23,600 villages, and we had 3.5 million cases.
3.5 million cases. That's what we found. This year, now we are 1986 to now, is not going to do them.
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Chapter 2: How did Jimmy Carter overcome local resistance to eradicate the Guinea Worm?
From 3.5 million. Right. And 521 of those cases were in South Sudan. This year, so far, we've just had seven cases. All of them in South Sudan. Unbelievable.
But here's the crazy part. So here's the thing. So we always think about, well, these types of scourges that hit these areas, and we have to develop the right medicine and the drug, or we have to create some sort of program. How was this solved?
No medicine will prevent it. No medicine will cure it. For 10,000s of years, they wrapped the guinea worm when it came out around a stick and put some tension on it so it would come out in 20 days instead of 30 days. So you had to suffer three weeks instead of four weeks. And so we found that if you pour the water through a filter cloth,
the kind that won't rot in the tropics, and we provided that. Then it screens out the guinea worm eggs, and then you can drink your filthy water without the guinea worm eggs, and you don't have the guinea worm. So that's what we've done.
All of this was education. You went there, and they showed... Now, were they resistant to that type of... Yeah, some of them were. It's changing thousands of years of how they were doing this.
Some of them were, because the medicine men were making a lot of money treating it by putting it on a stick and twisting it. Sure. And also, they thought that the pond was sacred, If it hadn't been for the pond, their ancestors wouldn't live, their village wouldn't be there. So we were insinuating that the disease came out of our sacred pond.
So then if you hold up the glass and have a magnifying glass, you can see the little things swimming around in there. So we convinced them that these were alien people, alien things in their pond, so they let us provide the filter cloths. But we had to go to every single village on Earth that had the disease.
So we feel that we have prevented about 80 million cases of guinea worms since we first started.
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Chapter 3: What is the impact of the Carter Center's work on neglected diseases?
Unbelievable. And this is just with the gauzes. Now, today... Do they now create the gauze themselves? You've got to keep going through there.
DuPont gave us a special filter that wouldn't rot in the tropics.
And that's the thing that you have to get to.
And it had to be woven by people that make parachutes. Wow. Where it's woven together tightly.
So you've eradicated, I mean, do you, now you got, you got, you know, Bill Gates is out there with malaria. Do you ever, you see him, you rib him a little bit? You'd be like, hey man, how's it going with malaria? Well, we work on malaria too. Because I've been kicking guinea worms butt for about 25 years now.
Well, we don't rag it because we get a lot of money from the Bill Gates Foundation.
Oh, that's what I meant. I meant they're very good people. Yeah, they're really good people. That's what I'm doing. I'm really one of Bill Gates' greatest admirers. When you go in there and you've earned their trust, are there other things that you want to accomplish in these villages?
Are there other things you want to do? Some of the same people. We go out in the jungle and in the desert areas where nobody else wants to go. They call these neglected diseases because nobody... They really didn't like the people.
Oftentimes, diseases of sanitation, diseases of simple 21st century, 20th century hygiene.
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Chapter 4: How does the Clinton Global Initiative respond to global health crises?
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My guest tonight, the 42nd president of the United States. His annual Clinton Global Initiative meeting now in its 10th year kicks off this Sunday, September 21st. Welcome back to the program, President Bill Clinton.
Sir.
How are you?
I'll tell you this, and I'm going to say this, and it's nice you were here to witness it. I live this every day. Just the ovations. You're good, too. But thank you.
I do this when I see you at home. I'm all alone, just clapping and screaming. Look at you now.
We just can't help ourselves. Exactly. 10 years of Clinton Global Initiative. So you have this thing all planned out. You've got these tremendous speakers, all your things in order. Something like this Ebola epidemic jumps up. It probably represents the confluence of all the various things that you can do at Clinton Global Initiative. How agile can you be when something like that arises?
Can you address it even at this year's conference?
Yeah, we are. How? We're going to have all the people from the World Health Organization and the UN and the Doctors Without Borders, Partners in Health, all these people are going to come together and talk about it. The United States has done a lot. President Obama's gotten some money through Congress and the Pentagon's committed a good bit of money and resources.
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