Trachoma Control

Trachoma is an infectious eye disease that causes blindness; it is prevalent in many poor rural communities. The World Health Organization has set the year 2020 as the target for global elimination of trachoma as a public health problem. To reach this target, the SAFE strategy (Surgery for trichiasis Antibiotics to treat Chlamydia trachomatis infection, and Facial cleanliness and Environmental improvement to reduce transmission of C. trachomatis from one person to another) is recommended for districts and communities with endemic disease. This guide has been written for managers of national and district trachoma control programs. It sets out, step-by-step, what is needed to assess the magnitude and extent of the trachoma problem in the area and how to plan, implement, monitor, and evaluate a program to control, and ultimately eliminate trachoma. Templates for a number of forms recommended for use in a program can be found in the annex. To allow adaptation of the forms for use in a specific program, electronic versions are available on the CD-ROM that accompanies this guide. The CD-ROM also contains an antibiotic requirement estimator, a template budget and a generic evaluation manual. Two versions of this guide are available:The trainer s version includes the guide with a set of 30 slides and the CD-ROM. The learner's version contains the guide with the CD-ROM.

"Update of: Trichiasis surgery for trachoma, the bilamellar tarsal rotation procedure and 'Final assessment of trichiasis surgeons."

This volume is the first book-length treatment of model-based geostatistics. The text is expository, emphasizing statistical methods and applications rather than the underlying mathematical theory. Analyses of datasets from a range of scientific contexts feature prominently, and simulations are used to illustrate theoretical results. Readers can reproduce most of the computational results in the book by using the authors' software package, geoR, whose usage is illustrated in a computation section at the end of each chapter. The book assumes a working knowledge of classical and Bayesian methods of inference, linear models, and generalized linear models.

Using the WHO-recommended “SAFE” strategy (surgery, antibiotics, facial cleanliness, environmental improvement), considerable progress is being made towards global elimination of trachoma as a public health problem. However, it has become apparent that in a small proportion of districts, despite apparently high-quality local implementation of the SAFE strategy, achieving the active trachoma criterion of elimination as a public health problem has been difficult to achieve. Such districts fall into at least two categories: (1) those in which the prevalence of trachomatous inflammation—follicular in 1–9-year-olds (TF1–9) continues to hover above the elimination threshold of 5% despite interventions; and (2) those in which TF1–9 5% is achieved but subsequently returns to ≥5% during the two-and-a-half-year period of surveillance after antibiotic mass drug administration ceases. How these districts should be managed is presently unclear. Uncertainty is deepened by programmatic reliance on TF1–9 as the WHO-recommended indicator for decision-making; TF prevalence is known to be a lagging marker as the prevalence of infection with trachoma’s causative organism, iChlamydia trachomatis/i, declines, and would likely also lag behind population-level infection recrudescence, too. Health ministries and their partners are keen to find solutions to this problem.brbrIn December 2021, WHO’s Department of Control of Neglected Tropical Diseases convened an informal consultation to allow discussion of the way forward with respect to this issue. This document is the meeting report.

Medicinal Spices and Vegetables from Africa: Therapeutic Potential against Metabolic, Inflammatory, Infectious and Systemic Diseases provides a detailed look at medicinal spices and vegetables that have proven safe-and-effective for consumption and the treatment of diseases, including infectious diseases, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. It provides pharmacological evidence, such as the latest information related to efficacy and safety data, in vitro and in vivo studies, clinical trials, and more, to illustrate the use of these spices and vegetables as both palliative and alternative treatments with the goal of furthering research in this area to produce safer and more effective drugs. Provides scientific evidence for the potential of medicinal spices and vegetables used in Africa to fight metabolic, inflammatory, and infectious diseases Includes a review of the latest methods used to investigate the effects of medicinal plants in the treatment of disease Offers an updated resource for students sand scientists in the fields of pharmaceutical science, pharmacognosy, complementary and alternative medicine, ethnopharmacology, phytochemistry, biochemistry, and more