For more than 3,000 years, the disease has remained one of the leading preventable causes of blindness, thus marking an unprecedented health and historical achievement for Cairo in the Eastern Mediterranean region.
The international certificate was presented on the sidelines of the 79th World Health Assembly in Geneva, where the Director-General of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, presented the certificate to Dr. Amr Kandil, Deputy Minister of Health and Population of Egypt, who received it on behalf of the Minister, Dr. Khaled Abdel Ghaffar.
This global announcement, for the second year in a row, confirms the boom in the health system in Egypt, where the country succeeded last year in obtaining the international certificate of being free from malaria, before trachoma followed suit to join the list of diseases that have been completely eradicated and no longer pose a threat to the public health of citizens.
Commenting on this event, the Egyptian Minister of Health and Population, Dr. Khaled Abdel Ghaffar, affirmed that the international certification represents international recognition of the success of national plans and the continuous support from the political leadership for the health system, stressing that this success is a strong incentive towards achieving the goals of the “Egypt 2030” vision for sustainable development, while the ministry continues to strengthen surveillance and preventive follow-up programs to ensure the country remains free of the disease.
For his part, Deputy Minister of Health, Dr. Amr Kandil, linked this health achievement to national projects to raise the efficiency of the infrastructure, noting that neglected tropical diseases are always linked to the level of environmental sanitation, the purity of drinking water and sewage networks, which the presidential initiative “Decent Life” has contributed to updating and developing directly within the villages and areas most in need.
It is worth noting that Egypt’s battle with trachoma has historical roots dating back more than 3,000 years, during which Egyptians suffered from the consequences of this disease, before organized efforts to combat it began in the early twentieth century with the launch of the first mobile and fixed eye hospitals, and today that long chapter is closed with the announcement that Egypt is the seventh country in the region to completely eliminate the disease.
