Fund cites dramatic progress against trachoma in Morocco and Tanzania
Morocco, Health, 12/5/2000

An international program to eliminate trachoma said Monday it has made major progress against the blinding disease in two African pilot projects and will expand to target 30 million more people.

The International Trachoma Initiative said its combination of hygiene and antibiotics has cut the disease's prevalence by more than half in the programs since they started last year.

The findings from the project involving 2 million people in remote regions of Tanzania and Morocco will be presented this week to the World Health Organization, which wants to eliminate by 2020 what it calls the world's leading preventable cause of blindness.

Head of the epidemiology and disease control at the Moroccan health ministry, said the program has reached over 90% of the concerned population in Morocco and consequently, the disease has disappeared from almost all of Morocco, except for five southeastern provinces where 1.5 million persons still face the risk.

In Morocco, $ 17 million-worth of zithromax doses have been distributed and 1.8 million doses are scheduled to be distributed in the three years to come.

The initiative was established in 1998 through a public-private partnership between the New York City-based Edna McConnell Clark Foundation and drug giant Pfizer Inc., which donated its oral antibiotic Zithromax to the program.

The Tanzanian and Moroccan projects combined Zithromax with health education that emphasized facial hygiene.

Pfizer will now contribute 10 million doses of the drug -- valued at $14 per dose -- and $6 million to cover operating expenses over the next three years, the initiative said Monday.

It said $27.4 million will be contributed over the next five years by the Clark Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Britain.

The money will be used to target millions more people in the six countries where the initiative is already under way -- Ghana, Mali, Morocco, Sudan, Tanzania and Vietnam -- and start new programs in other countries.

Trachoma once was a threat worldwide. With improved sanitation, it was eliminated from North America and Europe. But it still has left some six million people blind in developing countries and affects an estimated 150 million.

It is easily transmitted, with blindness following multiple infections that leave scarring on the inside of the eyelids, causing it to turn inward and damage the cornea by brushing it constantly with the eyelash.

Infections are spread person-to-person, mostly by children as they rub red, sticky eyes or by flies that pick up the germs from faces unwashed.

Since the 1950s, treatment had meant applying an ointment of the antibiotic tetracycline directly to the eyes twice a day for six weeks. The thick ointment stung and children in particular didn't comply.

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