Long description

Data are plotted for six countries in which guinea worm disease is endemic: Sudan, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, India and Pakistan. The horizontal axis is labelled year and marked from 1989 to 2001 at one-year intervals. The vertical axis is labelled reported case and is marked on a log scale from 0–10 up to 1 000 000. Both Nigeria and Ghana had several hundred thousand reported cases in 1989, and by 2001 case numbers in both countries had fallen to the thousands. Uganda had 100 000 cases in 1992 but by the year 2000, case numbers had dropped to below 10. Both Pakistan and India had relatively small numbers of reported cases in 1989, of the order of 1000 and 10 000 respectively; and in both counties case numbers fell to below 10 in the 1990s: by 1993 in Pakistan, and by 1996 in India. In contrast, numbers of reported cases in Sudan did not decline appreciably over the period of measurement: numbers fluctuated around 100 000 until 1999, and in 2001 were still many tens of thousands.