For global health, 2017 was a year of progress, near triumphs and threats

A trained community health workers in Bangalore, India takes photos of an oral lesion with a mobile phone during an oral cancer screening. Cancer is growing everywhere in the world. Photo: Biocon Foundation, Courtesy of Photoshare.

This was originally published on Global Health TV on Jan. 2, 2018.

In looking back over my last 12 blog posts here at Global Health TV, it is clear that 2017 was a year of progress, near triumphs and threats to global health.

In September, I reported that great progress has been made against diseases and health conditions that kill us (like respiratory infections, diarrhea, neonatal preterm deaths and communicable diseases like AIDS and malaria) while new threats had emerged  that are generally less fatal — things like obesity and mental illness.

In particular, we have made progress against communicable diseases but now face a rising tide of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) like cancer, diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular diseases, as I wrote at the beginning of 2017.  Cancer is growing almost everywhere in the world. For example, cervical cancer causes over 500,000 new cases every year, even though vaccination, early screening and treatment of precancerous lesions can prevent most cases.

The end of trachoma, world's leading cause of preventable blindness, is in sight

This woman, who was examined by a health worker at a clinic in Ressa Kebele, Kallo District, Amhara, Ethiopia, will receive trichiasis surgery. The arrow indicates which eye will be operated on. Credit: The Carter Center.

This was originally published on Global Health TV on December 13, 2016.

In 1988, as a young development worker for Lutheran World Relief in Mali, I was showing a group of American Lutherans our development projects in Dogon Country, when we came across a tragic situation —a young boy with a severely inflected eye, where he had lost his sight, with menacing flies hovering around the other, still good eye.

It was a heart-wrenching scene for these people, most of whom were on their first trip to Africa. One woman took pity on the boy and, after returning to the U.S., raised money for his treatment. I took the boy to the best hospital in the country in the capital Bamako. Doctors removed his infected eye, and replaced it with a glass eye. Without treatment, he surely would have gone completely blind.

That was my first exposure to trachoma, the world’s leading infectious cause of blindness in the world. Trachoma — a bacterial eye infection found in poor, isolated communities lacking basic hygiene, clean water and sanitation – continues to plague Mali and 40 or so other countries.