The Chief Executive of Sightsavers, Caroline Harper, visited Vancouver to discuss in her TED talk, an affliction called trachoma, which is considered one of the leading causes of blindness around the world. She wore symbolic tweezers to represent how African girls who have suffered from the disease for many years, have to spend their entire lives pulling their eyelashes from under their eyelids because of lack of treatment from the disease to avoid scratching their corneas which leads to blindness.
Harper’s
article on Sightsavers goes on to give a long history of the disease which has
its earliest recorded medical record in ancient Egypt when an ancient mural was
found showing eyes and tweezers. Today, people in the lowest economic rungs of
society are the most susceptible to the disease with nearly 185 million people
susceptible to trachoma. The most unfortunate part is that it is actually
preventable.
