The haunting call of the male guinea worm searching for his mate will soon be heard no more, thanks to Bill Gates and the World HealthOrganisation. 

This most beautiful creature, the tiger of the parasite world, is threatened with extinction.  The guinea worm presents one of the Nature’s most perfect adaptations.  Baby worms swimming in lakes, ponds and rivers are eaten by small water-borne animals, like water boatmen, which are then ingested by humans who drink this water unpurified.  The animal dies, and the worm larva is released to perform a dance of love.  Surviving both the highly acidic stomach and the highly alkaline intestines, and swimming blind, relying only on the instincts of its ancestors and its sense of duty, the worm penetrates the intestinal walls and in the darkness of the abdominal cavity sings to find its mate.  After a night of bliss, his work done, the male dies, and the female is left alone to fend for herself; she slowly migrates down the trunk of the body, and then down a leg, and at the ankle where there is little flesh, she feels the freshness and causes the skin to itch.  It itches so much that the sufferer more often than not will bathe it in cool water, and this signals the worm to puncture the skin and eject her brood into a local pond or river.  Her babies will in turn be eaten and the cycle will repeat; except that the UN has decreed a death sentence on the worm, and it will follow smallpox and rinderpest and be the third race deliberately exterminated by modern man.  Unlike the other two, the guinea worm is not fatal, and has been the subject of an eradication attempt more because it is vulnerable than because it is dangerous.x

Tony Milne                                                                             milnetony@hotmail.com