By Gabriel Ewepu

ABUJA- IN a bid to safeguard the health of Nigerians, Sightsavers Nigeria, Thursday, disclosed that it has recorded huge success in combating trachoma since it started in 2018.

This was made known by the Country Trachoma Coordinator, Sightsavers Nigeria, Teyil Wamyil-Mshelia, at the Accelerate Trachoma Elimination Programme Learning Event organised by Sightsavers Nigeria, who said under the Accelerate Trachoma Elimination Programme Nigeria had made a tremendous progress since its launch in 2018, which the organization used the WHO SAFE strategy.

According to her, over 60,000 people had been reached with TT case surgery across 195 LGAs.

She disclosed that Sightsavers together with six states creates interventions that would improve people’s behavior to attitudes so that they can stop practicing things that will lead them to have trachoma and its complications, and some of these attitudes include lack of facial washing while some of them also include open defecation.

Meanwhile, according to Sightsavers Nigeria, Nigeria carries 25% of the burden of neglected tropical diseases in Africa, and infectious diseases that can cause permanent blindness and long-term disability pose a high risk to people in Nigeria, therefore, its work in Nigeria on neglected tropical diseases focuses on trachoma, river blindness and intestinal worms.

She said: “When we started off, the aim was to reach over 60,000 people with TT case surgery, and this is where we are.

“And we still have surgeries ongoing this year as we speak. So this is across 195 LGAs in the country. We have also distributed almost 29 million treatments with azithromycin across the years to prevent sight loss.

“We have also trained over 25 trichiasis surgeons and also provided quality retraining for them to ensure that their skills are being maintained, and after the surgeries, the follow-up sessions were up to 98%complete.

“So in order for us to see how much we are maintaining our gains through surveys, we have been able to conduct a total of 174 trachoma surveys from 2018 to present, and we have trained over 50,000 trachoma case finders. These case finders are community members that go house to house to search for people with trachoma trichinosis so that we provide them with management.”

She also said the organization had introduced different data tools to improve and evidence their work including the TT Tracker App that tracks trachoma trichiasis patients from the point of surgery up until the last follow-up at three months, three to six months across seven states; collaboration with WASH partners to improve hygiene and sanitation, and to also improve opend efecation free status in some of states.

However, she said there are lessons to learn and areas to improve as “We set time for elimination, which is the year 2030, only three years from now, we can go there fast, go there well, with all the evidence that is required and all the lessons that we have gained. So we’re looking forward to seeing that everything that we have been able to achieve continues.

“The activities that we need to do to move forward towards elimination are properly documented. Those that are scalable will be scaled up, and those that need to be sustained will be followed up.”

While acknowledging the efforts of States and partners to eliminate trachoma in Nigeria, she (Wamyil-Mshelia), commended community members who had taken up the initiative to eliminate trachoma.

“The greatest people that did the work are the people at the lower levels, that’s the community members. They were the ones that believed that this cause is doable, and they owned the project, they owned all the activities that were introduced to them.

“They took it as their own and were able to get to where we are. We are not yet there, but it is good that once everybody is working together, we are able to achieve trachoma elimination in Nigeria.”

However, insecurity poses a threat to the close elimination of trachoma as the Chairman, National Trachoma Task Force, Adamu Mohammed who is also a consultant ophthalmologist speaking on the sidelines of the event lamented insecurity being a major challenge to nationwide elimination of the disease.

He pointed out that in the remaining 11 endemic Local Government Areas of Borno State, health workers are hindered to access them due to raving insecurity in these places.

“Most of the LGAs yet to achieve elimination are difficult to access because of insecurity. Our partners have done tremendously well, but insecurity continues to limit access to affected communities. There is only so much partners can do without adequate security”, he said.