https://fixthenews.com/p/the-telemetry
"
Chlamydia trachomatis is a bacterium, about a quarter of a micrometer
across, small enough that half a million can fit on the tip of a sewing needle.
It’s a shape-shifter: one strain causes chlamydia, the world’s most common
sexually transmitted infection. Another strain targets human eyes, causing a
disease called trachoma, and trachoma is a lesson in how much damage time can
do.
It begins in young children, spread by flies attracted to the moisture in their
eyes and noses. At first it feels like conjunctivitis. The kids rub constantly,
their eyes glued shut in the mornings from discharge, spreading the infection
to their siblings. This goes on for years, infection after infection, each one
leaving a little more scar tissue.
Then comes the turning point, quite literally. The scarred eyelid turns in on
itself. At first, one or two lashes touch the eye. They can be plucked, but
grow back in weeks, thicker. More turn inward until blinking becomes an
assault. Sunlight is agony. Squinting presses the lashes down harder. The pain
is relentless; people describe it as glass shards scraping the cornea. Sleep
becomes impossible because closing your eyes hurts too much.
Trachoma is old. Evidence of it has been found in human skulls from the Ice
Age. The Ebers Papyrus, written two centuries before Tutankhamun, contains a
suggested treatment. After ripping out the eyelashes, it recommends an ointment
of myrrh, lizard blood, and bats’ blood. Thousands of years later, the remedies
available to most people aren’t much better, so they develop increasingly
desperate coping strategies.
They tie string around their eyelashes, pulling them away from the eyeballs.
When the pain becomes unbearable, they pluck the lashes out - with tweezers if
they have them, with fingernails if they don’t. Some burn their lashes away
with hot ash. In the worst cases, they cut notches in their eyelids to change
the angle. Left untreated, the cornea scars until vision disappears entirely,
but the lashes keep scraping even after the world goes dark.
In the 19th century, trachoma was endemic in Europe and North America. Charles
Dickens based
Nicholas Nickleby on a boarding school in Yorkshire where the
boys were blinded by what was then known as Egyptian ophthalmia. Wordsworth
suffered repeated infections that left him fearing blindness, which he recorded
in
The Excursion. Irish immigrants were examined at Ellis Island and deported
if infected. It ravaged Native American communities and the barracks of the
First World War.
By the mid-20th century though, trachoma had vanished from the West, not
because of medicine, but as a side effect of prosperity. Indoor plumbing meant
faces could be washed with clean water. Sewage systems and garbage collection
eliminated the flies. The disease retreated to the world’s poorest places,
where it persists today, the most common infectious cause of blindness on the
planet, a plague that’s been with us since before the pyramids.
Or at least it was, because in November 2025, Egypt eliminated trachoma.
Senegal, Burundi, Mauritania, Fiji, Togo and Papua New Guinea also achieved
elimination status this year, and last year India, Pakistan and Vietnam got
there too. A decade ago, 192 million people lived in areas where trachoma was
endemic. Today that number has been cut nearly in half, and the number of
people blinded has fallen from 2.8 million to 1.2 million. It’s one of the most
inspiring things I’ve ever heard of, one of best things happening in the world
right now, yet not a single major news organisation reported anything about
trachoma in 2025."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
