El Salvador Becomes the First Central American Country to Eliminate Blinding Trachoma
For millions of people, trachoma starts as a rough, itchy patch under the eyelid and can end in darkness. Repeated infection scars the inner lid until the eyelashes curl inward and scrape the eyeball with every blink. That slow damage clouds the cornea and can steal a person’s sight for good. Trachoma is the world’s leading infectious cause of blindness, and it follows poverty, crowded housing, and water too scarce to spare for washing faces.
El Salvador just crossed it off the list. In July 2026, the World Health Organization validated the country as having eliminated trachoma as a public health problem, the first nation in Central America to reach that mark and the second in the Americas, after Mexico.
Eliminated as a public health problem means something specific, and it stops short of eradication. Eradication would mean the bacterium no longer exists anywhere on Earth. El Salvador cleared a measurable bar instead: the blinding late-stage cases are now rare enough to be found and treated one by one, fewer than 5% of young children show signs of active infection, and the health system can catch and treat any new case that appears.
To earn the validation, teams went looking in the places the disease would still hide. Between 2023 and 2026, health workers ran targeted checks in the communities flagged as highest risk, the poorer and more remote towns where trachoma tends to hold on. They found no sign the infection was still spreading, none in the children they screened, and no adults with the advanced form that threatens sight.
Getting there took more than eye exams. El Salvador paired the screening with cleaner water and better sanitation, stronger primary care, and vision checks for adults, then trained staff to keep watching afterward. The effort ran through the Initiative for the Elimination of Trachoma in the Americas, backed by the Pan American Health Organization and the government of Canada. “We are proud to have reached this achievement in just three years,” said the country’s minister of health, Francisco Alabi.
For a child in one of those towns, the result is concrete. The eye disease most likely to have taken their sight by adulthood is no longer circulating where they live, and if a case does appear, someone nearby now knows how to treat it before it blinds anyone.
El Salvador becomes one of 64 countries that have eliminated at least one neglected tropical disease, the group of infections that hit the poorest communities hardest. Trachoma is still a public health problem elsewhere in the region, including in neighboring Guatemala, and the target is to clear it worldwide by 2030. Country by country, that goal keeps moving within reach.
