There is only one per­ma­nent oph­thal­mol­o­gist in all of South­ern Sudan. So this poor eye doc­tor has to serve over eight mil­lion peo­ple. When a mobile oph­thal­mol­o­gist vis­its a vil­lage, hun­dreds of blind or sight lim­ited peo­ple will show up, too many for the staff to care for.

From this IPS arti­cle that we found at All Africa, writer Skye Wheeler describes the eye dis­eases that are preva­lent in South Sudan.

Dozens visit the eye clinic in the semi-autonomous region’s cap­i­tal every day from across the South try­ing to have their sight restored, mostly old and silent, wait­ing their turn with a helper. The Ethiopian doc­tor has per­formed hun­dreds of cataract oper­a­tions — remov­ing the pro­tein build-up that cov­ers the eye — that mirac­u­lously bring back sight.

Reversible cataract is prob­a­bly respon­si­ble for half the cases of blind­ness in the South, but Mulugeta and gov­ern­ment offi­cials in the health sec­tor know there are thou­sands who have no access to treat­ment. They also know — although no com­pre­hen­sive stud­ies have been done — that many thou­sands are at risk from two of the world’s lead­ing blindness-causing infec­tious dis­eases; river-blindness and trachoma.

“South Sudan looks to be the worst. Maybe two per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion is blind,” Mulugeta, who works with the Chris­t­ian Blind Mis­sion, said. This esti­mate is an extrap­o­la­tion of num­bers from neigh­bour­ing Ethiopia where 1.6 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion is visu­ally impaired but where there are far more pub­lic health ser­vices and infrastructure.

The Direc­tor of Eye Health at South Sudan’s health min­istry, Ali Yousif Ngor, over­sees the South Sudan part of an Africa-wide attempt to com­bat river blind­ness, also known as onchocer­ci­a­sis (O.V). It is a dis­ease spread by the black fly that car­ries lar­val forms of a worm par­a­site. These worms grow and breed, releas­ing thou­sands of lar­vae that move all over the body caus­ing intense itch­ing and blindness.

River blind­ness is pre­vented by widely dos­ing com­mu­ni­ties in affected areas with a drug called iver­mectin. For the last two decades iver­mectin has been pro­vided free of charge by a U.S. phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pany in an attempt to erad­i­cate the dis­ease in endemic coun­tries, mostly in Africa.

It was only at the end of the 22-year civil war in Sudan in 2005 that inter­na­tional health organ­i­sa­tions and gov­ern­ment offi­cials were given a chance to reach many rural com­mu­ni­ties. “It is so hard to get every­one to take the drug at the same time, twice a year. That would really hit the trans­mis­sion of the dis­ease,” Ngor said.

Part of the prob­lem is that offi­cials like Ngor sim­ply do not know how wide­spread the dis­ease is. Ngor said that the gov­ern­ment does not even know if O.V is more or less com­mon than tra­choma, another major cause of blind­ness in the South. Tra­choma occurs when untreated, repeated infec­tions of the eye by bac­te­ria even­tu­ally causes scar­ring so exten­sive the eye­lid par­tially turns in on itself. The lashes scratch the cornea caus­ing intense pain and often first reversible and then irre­versible blindness.

Like

Unlike