In Sight of a Remedy

Photograph by Harvey Wang

About 150 million people worldwide are infected with trachoma, the world’s leading cause of preventable blindness. Nearly six million of them have already been blinded by the disease, which is caused by an infectious bacterium that is endemic to more than a dozen countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.

Preventing the spread of trachoma is largely a matter of improving sanitation, hygiene, and access to clean water, as well as treating patients’ active infections with antibiotics. Simple surgical operations can often correct advanced stages of the disease.

For the past 14 years, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation has supported efforts to control trachoma and onchocerciasis, another leading cause of preventable blindness in developing countries, through its grant-making program in tropical-disease research. Last fall, however, the foundation gave the program institutional status by converting it to an independent entity, the International Trachoma Initiative, to which it gave $3.2-million.

As a new organization, the program is better able to raise additional money to support its work, which expanded considerably after the pharmaceutical company Pfizer agreed to donate antibiotics worth an estimated $60-million to the effort. Work initially has focused on five countries where the disease is widespread: Ghana, Mali, Morocco, Tanzania, and Vietnam.

Here, Sidney Kitala, a nurse who treats trachoma patients in Tanzania, checks the progress of the disease in one such patient. Mr. Kitala works for Helen Keller International, a charity based in New York that has received support from the new organization.