zlacker

>>bookof+(OP)
Eradication of the Guinea worm will be one of the huge milestones in the history of humankind. Just reading about them is nightmarish. In 1986 estimated 3,500,000 people had an infestation. Now we're well below 100. However eradication also needs animal cases to go to zero which are still in the hundreds.

Anyway, really great news about humanity beating one of its many terrible enemies just like the Malaria vaccine.

>>basili+rD1
I mentioned in another comment how hard it is for our brains to really comprehend the orders of magnitude difference between all animal cases (~680) and the former number of human cases (3.5M).

It would take ~5000 years at the current annual rate of animal cases to match the number of human cases just 40 years ago.

That's The Great Pyramid of Giza ago time... PLUS the amount of time since Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael roamed the earth.

The cool thing is that at a few hundred, one could theoretically* round up all (known) animal cases left. That's truly incredible work getting to this point if you think about it.

* Yes, geopolitical issues, geography, and plenty of other reasons might make this somewhat impossible... but the fact that we can actively picture a few hundred animals in our brains means that it's a very attainable goal.