Medal awarded for major contribution to trachoma eradication

Sarah Polack
and Gabriel Coscas

PARIS — The Trachoma Gold Medal, awarded annually by the International Organization Against Trachoma and the French League Against Trachoma at the meeting of the French Society of Ophthalmology, was given this year to Sarah Polack, PhD.

Dr. Polack is a lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which was a major contributor to the development of the Global Atlas of Trachoma. The Trachoma Atlas, an open-access resource, is a vast collection of up-to-date maps displaying the distribution of trachoma worldwide. It is available online here.

"Distribution maps can play an important role in identifying priority areas for control, assessing the magnitude of the disease, highlighting areas where data are lacking, monitoring changes over time and assessing overlap with other tropical diseases to implement integrated intervention programs," Dr. Polack said.

In introducing Dr. Polack, Gabriel Coscas, MD, president of the International Organization Against Trachoma and the French League Against Trachoma, noted that trachoma is still the first cause of infection-related preventable blindness worldwide, affecting 84 million people. It is endemic in several regions of Africa, the continent with the highest prevalence of the disease, and is present in areas of Asia, South America and Australia.

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