The government of The Gambia recently announced that the country had eliminated trachoma, a highly contagious eye disease, after years of hard work by health workers, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) and communities.
In The Gambia, the disease accounted for 17% of the reported blindness in a national survey in 1986. The prevalence of trachoma has dropped from 0.1% to 0.02% in the last 10 years. Current estimates show a prevalence of less than 0.2% in adults aged over 15 years. This is about one case per 1,000 people.
Trachoma has been described as the most infectious cause of blindness in the world, responsible for 1.4% of blindness. It is one of the 20 neglected tropical diseases that plague over a billion of the world’s poorest people.