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Wiping out Trachoma

1:00am Tuesday, 13th July 2010

Stephanie Gaut of CBM As a Project Officer in West Africa, CBM Australia’s Anna Gaskill has seen firsthand the affects of the painful and disabling eye disease trachoma. Tell us about someone you met who had trachoma. I’ll never forget meeting Martha in northern Kenya last year. She was an older woman, perhaps in her 60s, and had come into a clinic run by CBM’s partner. The eye nurse diagnosed Martha with trachoma and booked her in for eyelid surgery to save her sight. Martha had endured so much pain already, and kept tweezers hanging on a cord around her neck to quickly pluck out her eyelashes when the pain got too much. If she didn’t do this, the constant rubbing on her eye caused terrible pain. Martha had the eyelid rotation surgery and has now avoided blindness. Plus she longer needs to carry her tweezers. What is trachoma? Trachoma is the leading infectious cause of blindness around the world. The disease spreads easily when discharge from the eyes is spread from person to person. It can happen so easily: a mother wipes her children’s eyes with a dirty cloth, or a fly passes it on. Repeated infections cause scarring underneath the eyelid and it turns upside down before snapping the eyelashes into sharp bristles that scratch the eye and cause unbearable pain. If not treated it results in blindness. What is the S.A.F.E. strategy? The World Health Organisation together with CBM developed the S.A.F.E. strategy to deal with trachoma. It involves surgery when the eyelids have turned; the distribution of sntibiotics to wipe-out the infection in the community; and promoting sacewashing and snvironmental hygiene, to reduce the spread of infection. This strategy has seen trachoma disappear in some areas. How did you get involved in development work? I did some short-term missions in Africa and Brazil, then returned to Brazil for several years working with street children and their families in the favelas.