ATLANTA (WJBF) – Former US President Jimmy Carter’s body will continue to lie in repose at The Carter Center in Atlanta until Tuesday morning to allow visitors to pay one final goodbye.

Carter’s mission in setting up the center back in the 1980’s was to restore peace, fight diseases and build hope. He long advocated that access to health care is a human right.

The Carter Center uses health education using simple low cost prevention and treatment methods to provide access and reduce deaths, and also strives to improve resources for mental health care globally. They partner with local governments and non-profits to provide access to those who need it the most.

The center also works to fight six preventable diseases including guinea worm, river blindness, trachoma — a bacterial infection that impacts the eyes, snail fever, elephantiasis — which can lead to disability and malaria.

“One of the big things that the president and  his wife Rosalyn got involved in was to lead the global guinea worm eradication program,” said Adam Weiss, Director of guinea worm eradication program at The Carter Center. “This is an effort to eradicate a 3 foot parasite that people get by drinking bad water. His initiatives were to build up a community based surveillance system in endemic countries around the world.”

The Carter Center helps those in countries with limited medical resources to reduce these preventable diseases and treat multiple diseases at once.