Jimmy Carter, Who Has Died at Age 100, Spared Millions of People from Guinea Worm
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Project Brief
Objective: To showcase the contributions of Jimmy Carter and the Carter Foundation to the decline of guinea worm cases.
Scope: Pitched the graphic to support a finished article, sourced the data and events for annotations, made and revised the graphic
Team: I made the graphics and Tanya Lewis was the managing editor of the article.
Data Sources: The Carter Foundation and the CDC
Links:
During a slow period in my internship when not a lot of articles either requested or needed graphics, I went on a hunt for something to do. SciAm uses airtable to track their stories and divides them into Posted, Scheduled, Not Scheduled, Assigned, and On Hold. I spent an afternoon looking at all the stories that were not scheduled and assigned because they would have the flexibility time-wise for me to be able to make a graphic before publication. Doable for scheduled stories, but not as likely.
It wasn't until I had scrolled down to the On Hold section that I found an article written and ready for posting in memorial of Jimmy Carter's passing about his legacy with regards to guinea worms. I knew immediately that this article would benefit from a graphic showing the decline of guinea worm cases. And while it's basic enough, a clean, annotated line chart was actually something I don't think I'd ever really made at that point. I wanted to focus on the story rather than try to razzle dazzle with a flashy or unique chart. I pitched the idea to Tanya (the managing editor of the story) and Amanda (digital news graphics managing editor aka my boss) and one I had the thumbs up, I got to work.
First, I went hunting for case data and used the source from the chart made by Our World In Data. Even though the WHO has retired the data file, the numbers are still accurate and I pulled 2024 numbers from the Carter Center, I spent a LONG time investigating these numbers because every source I read said something to the effect of 3.5 million global cases prior to 1986, but nowhere did I see a primary source for this number. I spent hours and hours digging through the Guinea Worm Summit reports trying to solidify the murky picture of cases numbers prior to 1986 and was having a rough time. The surveillance systems weren't robust or wide-spread enough to call any numbers definitive.
(It was at this point in time Jen cracked one of my favorite jokes from my internship by observing that I was falling into a wormhole. It's so hard to hate a fantastically-made pun.)
I did eventually find the source paper for the 3.5M estimate, but couldn't actually get access to the actual paper itself. I ended up simply going with the WHO numbers because they more or less tracked with the values from the summit reports.
I then had to track down Carter's involvement, either directly or contributions made through the Carter Center. Fortunately the Carter Center has a timeline that I was able to dig through and pull out some key events.
I made the source figure in Flourish, remade it in Datawrapper because they do log axes and copied those over to Adobe Illustrator where I added the annotations.
I'm glad I had the chance to work on this graphic. Not only was I able to contribute a graphic that helps tell an article's story, but there was a bit of strategy to it. When I made the graphic, I had no way of knowing when the article would be published since it depended on Jimmy Carter's passing. I assumed it'd be after my internship ended (December 13th), and that meant that I'd be guaranteed to have at least one more graphic appear on SciAm's site even though I no longer worked there.
Ultimately, I didn't have to wait very long - Jimmy Carter died on December 29th.
And surprisingly, I received a lot of feedback because the article received a lot of traffic, particularly on bluesky:

And Laura Helmuth (previous EIC) emailed the team and said, "The timeline Zane made oomphs it all up and is stunning to see."
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