…through Children

“Now the importance of this message is that it’s the kids themselves who are empowered to protect themselves, they don’t have to wait for a benefactor to come along and do it for them.” - Paul Emerson, director of The Carter Center Trachoma Control Program

Where trachoma is highly endemic, children are often the most heavily infected group. They pass it on to the adults in their households, putting elders at risk of blindness.

Children serve as trachoma’s reservoir of infection, and it is often from them that adults get the disease.  But children are also one key to stopping trachoma’s spread.  The Ethiopian government and the Carter Center have created a curriculum that promotes facial cleanliness and awareness of trachoma in schools. Every morning, teachers inspect students’ faces for cleanliness. Those that are unclean are shown in the mirror, and then made to wash up.

Paul Emerson, director of the Carter Center’s Trachoma Control Program, says children are required to bring the lessons home, and to become effective educators in their own households:

“The kids will go home, and as part of the school health package one of the homework assignments is to find out if there’s anyone in their family or neighborhood with trichiasis, and to go and interview them. And then to report that back to the class, and to advise that person, how trichiasis is caused and that there is a free surgery available that can reverse the condition.”

One challenge of the endeavor has been to tie the relatively benign condition of sore eyes that children experience when they get trachoma, to the debilitating, blinding phase that can set in many years later, after repeated infections.  Some schools try to make that connection through games that underscore the value of eyesight, such as “pin the tail on the donkey.”

In Amhara, nearly two-thirds of the children are estimated to have active cases of trachoma.

Emerson says the curriculum also helps debunk a notion that is common in many places where trachoma is hyperendemic: that blindness from trachoma is an inevitable part of aging.

INTERACTIVE:

Narration by Fmr. President and Founder of The Carter Center, Jimmy Carter; and Dr. Paul Emerson, director of The Carter Center Trachoma Control Program.

Countering the Urban Rumor Mill

“One rumor is enough to destroy something really built and well-established, even. Because people start doubting and asking.” - Teshome Gebre, Country Representative for Ethiopia, The Carter Center

Although trachoma mainly affects rural areas, The Carter Center and the Ethiopian Ministry of Health expend time and resources educating dwellers of urban and peri-urban areas.  In the two months leading up to Maltra Week, targeted radio ads promoted the campaign, and a touring bus traveled into towns to host education and entertainment film nights.

Paul Emerson, director of the Carter Center Trachoma Control Program, says the target of these urban campaigns is young men, in their twenties.

“If there’s ever going to be a source of rumor or false information about the false campaigns, it always originates in this group of people. and they’re very well-connected, they have cell phones, they have relatives in the rural areas, and if they have a positive experience here, which they clearly are, then you get a very positive message going out, instead of the risk of a negative rumor coming out.”

Emerson says in the past, the program has had to counter rumors that their distribution of Zithromax, a drug that treats trachoma, was really a stealth family planning campaign engineered by the Ethiopian government.

Tags: amhara, blindness, carter center, ethiopia, flies, Odette Yousef, sanitation, The Carter Center, trachoma, water

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