“Sitra and Neima have trachoma – a bacterial infection that can hurt their eyes and make it hard for them to see.”
This is what Asma was told by health workers at a community eye screening in her remote village in Ethiopia. She had brought her three daughters in for examination and learned that her two youngest daughters, Neima (age 3) and Sitra (age 6) both had active signs of trachoma – a highly contagious bacterial infection.
Before the examination, Asma had noticed her daughters struggling to see. “Their eyes get red, swell, and water. They are in pain and itching their eyes,” she told Orbis-trained health workers. Sometimes the pain they experienced kept them from going to school or playing with their friends. The children would even have to cover their eyes while outside in the sunlight!
Asma’s fears grew with her daughters’ diagnoses, and she wondered if they might lose their sight completely to trachoma.
Sadly, she was right to be concerned.
Trachoma is a leading cause of blindness globally. Unfortunately, for children in Ethiopia, the risk of infection is alarmingly high: nearly 40% of children under the age of nine are estimated to have an active trachoma infection.
If left untreated, Neima and Sitra’s trachoma infections could have developed into trichiasis – a painful condition causing the eyelids to turn inward and the eyelashes to scrape the surface of the eyes, leading to irreversible blindness.
But the good news is, with proper care, early-stage trachoma infections can be treated, and future infections can be prevented with simple doses of antibiotics that often cost less than $1.
