What if we eliminated one of the worlds oldest diseases Caroline Harper
I’d like you to imagine,
just for a moment,
that your eyelashes grew inwards
instead of outwards,
so that every time you blinked,
they would scrape
the front of your eyeballs,
damaging the corneas,
so that slowly and painfully,
you went blind.
Well, that’s what happens
to a person who has trachoma.
Now, this little boy here, Pamelo,
from Zambia, he has trachoma.
And if we don’t do anything,
he’s going to go blind.
Trachoma is a curious disease.
It’s a bacterial infection
that’s passed from person to person
and by flies.
The repeated infection
will scar your eyelids
so that they contract
and they turn inside out.
It particularly affects women,
because they have
the contact with children.
So what you’ll often see
in places like Ethiopia
are girls who have tweezers
like this around their necks,
and they use them
to pluck out their eyelashes.
But of course, that only gives them
temporary respite,
because they just grow back
more vicious than before.
There are around two million
people in the world
who are blind or visually impaired
because of trachoma.
And we believe there may be
as many as 200 million people
who are at risk.
Now, it’s a very old disease.
What you can see is a photo
of a wall of a tomb in Northern Sudan.
A colleague and I were traveling
in a very remote village,
and we asked an old man
to take us down into a little tomb.
Now, on the wall, we saw two eyes.
One is crying,
and you can see
there are tweezers next to it.
Simon said to me, “My God,
do you think that’s trachoma?”
So we sent this picture
to the British Museum,
and they confirmed that, yes,
this is trachoma.
So, thousands of years ago,
the ancient Nubians
were painting pictures of trachoma
on the walls of their tomb.
And the tragedy is
that disease is still rampant
in that area today.
And the crazy thing is,
we know how to stop it.
And what’s great is that the trachoma
community have all come together
to pool their efforts.
We don’t compete; we collaborate.
I have to tell you,
that’s not always the case
in my experience in the NGO world.
We’ve created something
called the International Coalition
for Trachoma Control.
And together, we’ve developed
a strategy to fight it.
This strategy is called the SAFE strategy,
and it’s been approved
by the World Health Organization.
The “S” stands for “surgery.”
It’s very straightforward procedure
to turn the eyelids back the right way.
We train nurses to do it,
and they use local anesthetics.
And as you can see, you can do it
in somebody’s front porch, if need be.
Then “A” stands for “antibiotics.”
These are donated by Pfizer,
who also pay for those drugs
to be transported to the port in-country.
From there, they’re taken to the villages,
where hundreds of thousands
of community volunteers
will distribute those drugs to the people.
Now, we train those volunteers,
and we also help the ministries
with all that complex logistics.
And every one of those volunteers
has a pole like this.
It’s called a “dose pole.”
This one’s from Cameroon.
And you can see it’s marked
different colors,
and you can tell how many pills
you should give somebody,
based on how tall they are.
“F” stands for “face washing.”
Now, we used to have trachoma
in the UK and in the US.
In fact, President Carter,
he talks about how trachoma
was a real problem in Georgia
when he was a little boy.
And in the UK, the famous
eye hospital, Moorfields,
was originally a trachoma hospital.
What we do is teach kids like this
how important it is to wash their faces.
And finally, “E” stands for “environment,”
where we help the communities
build latrines,
and we teach them to separate
their animals from their living quarters
in order to reduce the fly population.
So we know how to tackle the disease.
But we need to know where it is.
And we do,
because a few years ago,
Sightsavers led an incredible program
called the Global Trachoma
Mapping Project.
It took us three years,
but we went through 29 countries,
and we taught local health workers
to go district by district,
and they examined the eyelids
of over two and a half million people.
And they used Android phones
in order to download the data.
And from that, we were able to build a map
that showed us where the disease was.
Now, this is a very high-level map
that shows you which countries
had a problem with trachoma.
And you may ask me,
“Well, does this strategy actually work?”
Yes, it does.
This map shows you the progress
that we’ve made to date.
The green countries believe
they’ve already eliminated trachoma,
and they have either been through
or are in the process of
having that validated by the WHO.
Countries in yellow
have the money they need,
they have the resources
to eliminate trachoma.
And some of them are really nearly there.
But the red countries,
they don’t have enough funding.
They cannot eliminate trachoma
unless they get more.
And we’re quite concerned, though,
that the progress to date may stall.
So when we were talking
to the Audacious ideas guys,
we asked ourselves:
If we really, really pushed ourselves
over the next four or five years
and we had the money,
what do we think we could achieve?
Well, we believe
that we can eliminate trachoma
in 12 African countries
and across the Americas
and all across the Pacific.
And we can make significant progress
in two countries which have
the highest burden of the disease,
which is Ethiopia and Nigeria.
And in doing all of that,
we can leverage more than two
billion dollars' worth of donated drugs.
(Applause)
Now, this map here shows you
the impact that we’ll have –
look how many countries are going green.
And there, you can see progress
in Ethiopia and Nigeria.
Now, yes, there are some countries
that are still red.
These are mainly countries
which are in conflict –
places like Yemen, South Sudan –
where it’s very difficult to work.
So, we have the team,
the strategy and the map.
And we also have the relationships
with the governments
so that we can make sure
that our program is coordinated
with other disease-control programs,
so that we can be efficient.
Wouldn’t it be amazing
if we could do this?
We’d have trachoma on the run.
We would be on the home straight
to eliminate this disease
from the whole world.
But before I finish,
I just want to share with you
some words from
the founder of Sightsavers,
a guy called Sir John Wilson.
Now, he was blinded at the age of 12.
And he said,
“People don’t go blind by the million.
They go blind one by one.”
And in the excitement of being able to say
we’ve got rid of trachoma
for the whole country,
let’s not forget that, actually,
this is a devastating disease
that destroys the lives
of individual people.
People like Twiba.
Now, I met Twiba last year in Tanzania.
She had had trachoma
for as long as she could remember.
And a couple of months before I met her,
she’d had the operation.
It’s no exaggeration to say
that this had totally
transformed her life.
We’d saved the sight that she had left,
and she was free of pain.
She could sleep.
She could work, she could socialize.
And she said to me,
“I have my life back.”
And it was impossible
not to be moved by her story.
But there are so many Twibas.
I want to find all the Twibas,
and I don’t want anyone
to go blind in agony anymore.
Now, you know, there are so many
intractable problems in this world.
But this is not one of them.
This is something that we can solve.
And we can ensure
that kids like this can grow up
free from the fear of trachoma.
So, for the sake of kids like this,
and for the sake of people like Twiba,
let’s get rid of trachoma.
Do you think we can?
Well, yeah, if we really, really want to.
Yes, we can.
So thank you.
(Applause)