What if we eliminated one of the world's oldest diseases? | Caroline Harper

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 26 June 2018

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

Thousands of years ago, ancient Nubians drew pictures on tomb walls of a terrible disease that turns the eyelids inside out and causes blindness. This disease, trachoma, is still a scourge in many parts of the world today -- but it's also completely preventable, says Caroline Harper. Armed with data from a global mapping project, Harper's organization Sightsavers has a plan: to focus on countries where funding gaps stand in the way of eliminating the disease and ramp up efforts where the need is most severe. Learn more about their goal of consigning trachoma to the history books -- and how you can help. (This ambitious plan is one of the first ideas of The Audacious Project, TED's new initiative to inspire global change.)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This TED Talk features advocate for the visually impaired Caroline Harper recorded live at TED-2018.
0:09.3	I'd like you to imagine just for a moment that your eyelashes grew inwards instead of outwards,
0:18.2	so that every time you blinked, they would scrape the front of your
0:22.3	eyeballs, damaging the corneers, and so that slowly and painfully you went blind. Well, that's what
0:30.4	happens to a person who has trachoma. Now, this little boy here, Pamelo from Zambia, he has trachoma.
0:39.3	And if we don't do anything, he's going to go blind.
0:43.3	Tricoma is a curious disease.
0:45.4	It's a bacterial infection that's passed from person to person and by flies.
0:51.5	The repeated infection will scar your eyelids so that they contract and they turn
0:58.3	inside out, particularly affects women because they have the contact with children. So what you'll
1:05.8	often see in places like Ethiopia are girls who have tweezers like this around their necks,
1:13.4	and they use them to pluck out their eyelashes.
1:17.0	But of course, that only gives them temporary respite
1:19.7	because they just grow back more vicious than before.
1:24.1	There are around 2 million people in the world who are blind or visually impaired because of trachoma.
1:30.3	And we believe there may be as many as 200 million people who are at risk.
1:37.3	Now, it's a very old disease.
1:40.3	What you can see here is a photo of a wall of a tomb in northern Sudan.
1:46.5	Collie and I were traveling in a very remote village,
1:49.3	and we asked an old man to take us down into a little tomb.
1:53.5	Now, on the wall, we saw two eyes, one is crying,
1:57.7	and you can see there are tweezers next to it.
	...

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