Jimmy Carter to Address Cancer Diagnosis in News Conference

Former President Jimmy Carter is expected to publicly talk for the first time at 10 a.m. Thursday about his cancer diagnosis. “Recent liver surgery revealed that I have cancer that now is in other parts of my body”, Carter said in a statement released last week.

Carter said he planned to undergo treatment at Emory Healthcare in Atlanta. He promised to reveal more details soon. His prognosis was then considered excellent, the Carter Center said in a statement earlier this month. He said his father, brother and two sisters all died from the disease and that his mother also had it. Carter has been leading the classes for more than 25 years. He cut short an election monitoring trip to Guyana in May.

The center announced Carter had a small mass removed from his liver August 3.

Carter was the nation’s 39th president.

Carter, a peanut farmer from Georgia, served as president from 1977 to 1981, his one-term in the White House defined by national economic struggles and the embarrassing Iran hostage crisis.

He founded the Carter Center and became a global humanitarian, focusing on health care and democracy. In 2002, he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, have three sons and a daughter. When the couple is in Plains, Carter frequently teaches a Sunday School class before services at Maranatha Baptist Church.