Up to 80% of adults in the area suffer sight loss, caused by the infectious and preventable disease trachoma, so the Ol Malo Trust runs surgical camps, bringing doctors from the UK.
More than 1 million Kenyans are blind or visually impaired, many of them due to cataracts – the main cause of avoidable blindness – and the preventable infection trachoma, which can be transmitted through crowded living quarters and poor sanitation, and leads to irreversible blindness.
Chlamydia trachomatis is the most common cause of non specific urethritis in the industrialised world, and the major infectious cause of preventable blindness (trachoma) in the third world [ 1, 2]. C. trachomatis can be divided into at least 15 serovars or serotypes, distinguished by ompA sequencing [ 3], which are associated with different disease pathologies [ 4].
Recently, Dean et al. examined 101 conjunctival samples of trachoma (preventable blindness) patients who resided in a trachoma-endemic region of Nepal [ 26].
Prevention of trachoma is even cheaper.
Pfizer Inc. and The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation announced at a press conference here today that they plan to formally initiate an attack on the leading cause of preventable blindness--trachoma--by providing antibiotics and hygiene education in five developing countries.
"We are the last developed nation in the world where the infectious and wholly preventable eye disease of trachoma exists," he told Parliament.
It is a bigger problem in low income countries, in areas with poor sanitation and infrastructure, where the bacteria which causes the infection, chlamydia trachomatis, is spread through personal contact and even by flies, infecting people via the eyes, and causing a condition called trachoma – the biggest preventable cause of blindness in the world.
In the instance where different causes of vision loss had been identified for each eye separately in a given individual, the principal disorder was chosen to be the one that was most readily curable or, if not curable, most easily preventable (i.e. cataract, trachoma, non-trachomatous CO, and other causes in that order).
