For most of human history, trachoma was simply part of the landscape of poverty - a bacterial infection of the eye that, untreated, scars the eyelid, turns the lashes inward, and slowly scratches a person blind. It is the world's leading infectious cause of blindness. This week, one country crossed it off the list.
On July 13, the World Health Organization validated El Salvador as having eliminated trachoma as a public health problem - the first country in Central America, and the second in the Americas after Mexico, to get there [1]. The country did it in about three years: assessments found no active transmission, no signs of the disease in children, and no advanced, blinding cases left untreated [1].
'I congratulate El Salvador on this remarkable achievement,' the WHO's director-general said, crediting the country's political commitment, strategic investment, and community engagement [1]. The work behind it is unglamorous and durable: cleaner water and sanitation, stronger primary care, and surgery for the people whose eyelids had already turned - reaching, as the regional health office put it, the communities in the most vulnerable conditions [1].
Data
| 2002 | 1,500 million people at risk |
|---|---|
| 2011 | 314 million people at risk |
| 2025 | 97.1 million people at risk |
El Salvador's milestone sits inside a larger retreat. The number of people worldwide who need treatment to protect them from trachoma has fallen to 97.1 million, down 94 percent from the roughly 1.5 billion who were at risk in 2002, and from 314 million as recently as 2011 [2]. Around 30 countries have now eliminated the disease outright [2].
A disease that blinded people for thousands of years is being pushed, one country at a time, toward the exit. El Salvador is the newest name on that list, and the list keeps getting longer [1][2].
