Former US President Jimmy Carter enters hospice care

The Nobel peace prize winner and former US President Jimmy Carter has entered home hospice care, his Carter Centre charity said.

The Georgia-based charity said that after a series of short hospital stays, Mr Carter “decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice care instead of additional medical intervention.”

The Carter Centre promotes democracy and conflict resolution, monitors elections, and advances public health in the developing world.

As president, Mr Carter helped facilitate peace between Israel and Egypt. In 1978, they signed the Camp David Accords, agreements between Israel and Egypt, that led in the following year to a peace treaty.

He was also president during the Iranian hostage crisis that developed when Americans were taken hostage at the US embassy in Tehran.

The Carter Centre said he has the full support of his medical team and family, which “asks for privacy at this time and is grateful for the concern shown by his many admirers.”

The charity’s headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, are not far from the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr.

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

Mr Carter, 98, was the 39th US president. He defeated former President Gerald R Ford in 1976. He served a single term and was defeated by Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980.

In August 2015, Mr Carter had a small cancerous mass removed from his liver. The following year, he announced that he needed no further treatment, as an experimental drug had eliminated any sign of cancer.

Mr Carter celebrated his last birthday in October with family and friends in Plains, the tiny Georgia town where he and his wife, Rosalynn, were born in the years between First World War and the Great Depression.

He also regularly helps the Habitat for Humanity charity where volunteers build affordable homes.

He won the 1976 presidential election after beginning the campaign as a little-known, one-term Georgia governor.