The President and the Dragon: The Untold Story of How a Farmer-President and Forgotten Heroes Fought the World's Most Ho, (Paperback)

A riveting account of how an unlikely alliance between a former U.S. president and the world's most forgotten people waged war against a 3,000-year-old parasite-and won.

For millennia, a microscopic larva lurking in contaminated water has inflicted unspeakable agony on millions. Once inside the human body, it grows silently for a year before erupting as a three-foot worm through the skin-a medieval torture that has persisted into the modern age. No vaccine exists. No medication can stop it. The only treatment is the same one used in ancient Egypt: slowly wind the emerging parasite around a stick over agonizing weeks.

In 1986, this disease-Guinea worm-held 3.5 million people hostage annually. The world had forgotten them. But one man refused to look away.

Jimmy Carter, defeated in his bid for reelection and written off by political elites, embarked on the most audacious mission of his life: the complete eradication of a disease that experts declared impossible to defeat. Descending into war zones where bullets flew and hope died, Carter assembled an unprecedented army of ex-child soldiers turned healers, village volunteers who couldn't read but could save lives, and exhausted doctors who chose malarial swamps over comfortable hospitals.

The President and the Dragon takes you deep inside humanity's most remarkable-and least known-medical triumph. From negotiating the world's first "disease ceasefire" in Sudan's brutal civil war to the painstaking elimination of the final 14 cases scattered across Earth's most dangerous territories, this is the story of what becomes possible when the powerful genuinely serve the powerless.

Through meticulous research and compelling narrative, Kate Bliss reveals the forgotten heroes who fought in obscurity: the mother who created songs to teach prevention after suffering ten simultaneous worm infections; the former child soldier who traded his rifle for cloth filters; the 100-year-old president who refused to die before witnessing the parasite's extinction.

This is more than a medical detective story. It's a testament to human resilience, a blueprint for defeating "impossible" challenges, and proof that the greatest victories often belong to those whose names history never records. As the world stands on the brink of eradicating only the second human disease in history-without a single vaccine or drug-this book preserves the memory of an achievement that changed millions of lives and redefined what compassion looks like in action.