Blinding disease eliminated in El Salvador

“El Salvador has become the first country in Central America to eliminate trachoma as a public health problem. Trachoma is an eye infection that can cause blindness after several untreated infections,” reports The Doomslayer.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has validated El Salvador as having eliminated trachoma as a public health problem. Trachoma is the world’s leading infectious cause of blindness…

Elimination of trachoma as a public health problem is defined as: (i) a prevalence of trachomatous trichiasis (TT) “unknown to the health system” of < 0.2% in ≥15-year-olds; and (ii) a prevalence of trachomatous inflammation – follicular (TF) in children aged 1–9 years of < 5%, in each formerly endemic district; plus (iii) the existence of a system to identify and manage incident cases of TT.

Other countries validated by WHO as having eliminated trachoma as a public health problem are: Algeria, Australia, Benin, Burundi, Cambodia, China, Egypt, Fiji, Gambia, Ghana, India, Iraq, Islamic Republic of Iran, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Libya, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Myanmar, Nepal, Oman, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Togo, Tunisia, Vanuatu and Viet Nam.

El Salvador is the first country in Central America and the second in the Americas to achieve this milestone.

Burundi is in Africa, and is the second poorest country on Earth. It experiences ethnic massacres from time to time, such as when its government killed between 100,000 and 300,000 members of the Hutu ethnic group in 1972. But Burundi still managed to eliminate trachoma as a public health problem, last year.

“According to the World Health Organization, the number of people at risk of contracting trachoma, a bacterial eye infection, fell to 97 million in late 2025, down from 1.5 billion in 2002.”

In other good news, the African nation of Guinea recently eradicated sleeping sickness, a parasitic disease carried by the tsetse fly that causes irreversible brain damage, aggressiveness, psychosis, and then death, if left untreated.

Niger recently became the first nation in Africa to eliminate river blindness, a disease spread by flies that breed near rivers. Those flies carry long thin parasitic worms that burrow in a victim’s skin.