World Sight Day, celebrated annually on the second Thursday of October, brings global awareness to vision impairment and blindness. According to the WHO, at least 1 billion people have some form of preventable vision impairment. Cataracts and refractive errors are the leading causes of blindness; infectious diseases of the eye, including trachoma and onchocerciasis, lead to devastating disabilities in countries endemic for neglected tropical diseases. Trachoma, a preventable bacterial infection, is the leading infectious cause of blindness and affects over 2 million people worldwide. 

In honor of World Sight Day, Leslie Sorensen (NTD-Support Center) recently sat down with Dr. Esmael Habtamu, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), and the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Director of Eyu-Ethiopia, a Non-governmental Eye Care Research, Training and Service Centre, to discuss his exceptional career fighting blinding trachoma in Ethiopia

Click on the image below to view the video or read the transcript under the video.