Former President Carter in Nepal/Image courtesy of Carter Center

Carter Says Tests Show No Sign of Cancer

| published December 6, 2015 |

By Thursday Review editors

 

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter issued a brief statement on Sunday that recent medical tests showed that his cancer was gone. Carter said that a brain scan conducted as recently as last week produced no signs of the brain cancer that had been diagnosed earlier this year.

However, the former President, now 91, said that despite indications that he had won this battle with cancer, he and his doctors had concluded that he should proceed with his current regimen of treatment, which began in August of this year after the discovery that a melanoma on his liver had spread to his brain. At that time, the medical outlook for Carter was less-than-optimistic, despite the former President’s upbeat, determined attitude.

Carter’s statement did not elaborate on the results from the MRI and other imaging work done last week, but he stressed that the spots originally visible on his brain had vanished. His statement said that he will “continue to receive regular three-week immunotherapy treatments of pembrolizumab.”

Carter made the announcement officially, through a staff spokesperson and through the Carter Center, and also—according to some Georgia newspapers—in his weekly Sunday school class at the Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia. In November, the Carter Center had told reporters that Carter was responding well to the treatment regimen prescribed, and reported that Carter’s doctors had found no evidence that his cancer had spread.

Jimmy Carter was elected President in 1976, defeating then-Vice-President Gerald Ford. Carter, a Democrat, served for four years, and among his most important achievements was the brokering of the Camp David Accord, a landmark peace deal reached by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1978. Sadat and Begin won the Nobel Peace Prize for the work, though Carter did not share in the prize. In 2002, however, the former President won the Nobel Peace Prize in his own right for his many national and international causes, including Habitat for Humanity, improving the fairness of election process for democracies around the world, and supporting several groups fighting disease and famine in Africa.

Carter served as the 39th President of the United States. Unable to craft significant improvement to a long-suffering economy during the late 1970s, he was defeated for re-election in November 1980, losing in a landslide to Ronald Reagan.

Related Thursday Review articles:

The Agent Who Saved a President; R. Alan Clanton; Thursday Review; October 10, 2015.

Hamlet’s Passing: Mario Cuomo, Rest in Peace; R. Alan Clanton; Thursday Review; January 2, 2015.