BREAKING: Jimmy Carter Says Cancer Has Spread To Brain

By MARC TORRENCE (Patch National Staff)

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said at a press conference Thursday in Atlanta that his cancer has spread to his brain.

Carter, 90, announced last Wednesday that he had been diagnosed with cancer while having liver surgery.

Thursday he said that doctors are now telling him he has four “very small spots” of melanoma on his brain. When doctors told him of the tumors on his brain, he said “I thought I had just a few weeks left.”

“Thinking of President Carter & his courage and honesty facing his own health problems & helping stop devastating diseases around the world,” Tom Friedan, director of the Centers for Disease Control, tweeted Thursday.

Carter will be treated at Emory hospital and said that in the mean time “I’m going to cut back fairly dramatically on my obligations at Emory, at the Carter Center.”

He said he still hopes to take a trip to Nepal in November with Habitat for Humanity.

Carter served as the 39th president, from 1977 to 1981, and has been referred to, even among many of his detractors, as perhaps the most publicly active U.S. president in history.

He started the Carter Center in Atlanta in 1984 to advance human rights worldwide, which includes, as its website points out “resolving violent conflicts, avancing democracy and human rights, preventing diseases, and improving mental health care.”

Carter is also heavily involved in Habitat for Humanity, where he and his wife, Rosalynn started an annual week-long initiative to build houses while raising awareness for affordable housing.

He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”