
“Cape Verde and Egypt became malaria-free. Brazil and Timor Leste eliminated lymphatic filariasis, the disfiguring parasite that causes a condition commonly known as elephantiasis. Jordan became the first country to ever be certified as leprosy-free. Chad got rid of one form of human African trypanosomiasis or sleeping sickness. And Pakistan, Vietnam and India eliminated trachoma, which causes blindness,” reports NPR.
The lethal disease of smallpox, which had killed hundreds of millions through human history, was eradicated from the entire world in 1980.
NPR describes how Pakistan, one of the world’s poorer countries, managed to eradicate trachoma:
Wiping out trachoma was a childhood dream for Asad Aslam Khan. As a young boy, on visits to his father’s village outside of Lahore, Pakistan, he’d see the rice, sugar cane and wheat fields stretch out before him. But the image he couldn’t get out of his mind: All the people who could no longer work in the fields.
“They had red eyes, watery eyes. They were in pain,” he remembers. “It was a miserable situation.”
The source of their pain was a condition called trachoma. It’s a bacterial infection and when someone is infected repeatedly — upward of 100 times — it can cause their eyelashes to turn inward and scratch the surface of the eye. It’s painful and can cause blurred vision and, eventually, irreversible blindness. For nearly 2 million people around the world, trachoma leads to visual impairment….Now, more than 50 years later, Khan has done something. He’s led Pakistan’s initiative to eliminate trachoma as a public health problem. “And, by the grace of almighty Allah, we now have become a trachoma-free country,” says Khan, who is an ophthalmologist and has been the chairman of the Ministry of Health’s National Trachoma Task Force for more than 20 years.
Last year, trachoma was almost eradicated from Zimbabwe, where it has been banished from all but three remote districts. In 2023, trachoma was eliminated from Iraq.
Ethiopia, Somalia, and Niger have the highest rates of trachoma — in 2021, Ethiopia alone had over a million people with the disease. There were also large populations of trachoma sufferers in Nigeria, South Sudan, and Afghanistan, as of 2021, although Nigeria has reportedly made progress since then.