BAMAKO, Mali -- When you begin to go blind from trachoma, the first thing you feel is an eyelash scraping your eye.



When I first traveled through West Africa as a student backpacker more than 30 years ago, I was haunted by the beggars disabled by blindness, leprosy and polio. Now, I'm on my annual win-a-trip journey with a university student, Erin Luhmann of the University of Wisconsin, and she is encountering a fundamentally improved landscape from the one I saw when I was her age.


"My eyes felt as if someone had thrown a handful of sand in them," Nawara Souko, who suffered from trachoma for years, told us. Her husband is dead, and, without sight, she found it difficult to farm or care for her five children. Three died.

Then Nawara received a 15-minute surgery from a public nurse trained by Helen Keller International, an American aid group. Sometimes the surgery, which straightens the eyelid, comes too late to restore vision. In Nawara's case, the operation ended the pain -- and she could see again.

Erin and I watched trachoma surgeries in a village 100 miles west of the Malian capital of Bamako. Villagers who for years had endured agony -- one woman compared it to childbirth, except that it goes on for years -- had their lives transformed.


"Get out of my way!" she recalled telling him. "I can see! I can walk by myself!"

The cost of this surgery here in Mali is less than $40 per person, according to Shawn Baker of Helen Keller International. So the next time you hear that humanitarian aid is "money down a rat hole," well, think of Yagare Traore.

Prevention of trachoma is even cheaper. Train villagers in improving hygiene and distribute antibiotics at a cost of less than $1 per person, and trachoma disappears so that people don't even need surgery.





"I'm fine," Muhammad told us, but he didn't look it. He walks awkwardly with crutches, and his eyes burn with fear and the unfairness of it all.



As the disease burden declines, the economy surges. Africa is now booming economically, and six of the 10 fastest-growing economies in the world are on the continent. Don't think of Africa as a place to pity, but as a place to invest.

Journalists and humanitarians understandably focus on unmet needs, and that can leave the impression that the story of global health is a depressing one of failure. In fact, it's an inspiring story of progress. We need to do more, especially against AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, but one of the great achievements of humanity in recent decades has been the marginalization of ancient and dreaded diseases.

