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Hello, this is Adrian Hopkins,
we are going to go into the second talk
around onchocerciasis or river blindness.
In the first part we talked about
the actual disease, the vector,
the parasites and how we could
treat it on an individual basis,
and looked forward a little to the fact
that we could do mass treatment.
Now we are going to move into various
ways of controlling the disease in
the community, with the possibility of
an eventual elimination of the disease.
Certainly in some foci it's very
close to that in America, and
there are some areas in Africa where
we've already had some good success.
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The way I thought we would do this would
be to look at it from a programme point of
view and
ask three main questions: firstly,
where are we now with our programs?
Some of these programmes
have been going for years.
Secondly, where do we want to be?
We had hoped to be stopping treatment
everywhere by 2025, that may happen,
though it probably won't in
the Democratic Republic of Congo,
South Sudan or in Angola,
not because Angola is difficult but
because it hasn't got its act together
with its treatment strategies yet.
Possibly not in the Central African
Republic where we had a good programme but
constant conflict has been a problem,
and in Yemen it's the same,
we've had some good planning but
the civil war has led to major problems.
But we do hope that we will eliminate the
transmission of the disease in most areas
and we are already
celebrating some success,
in the Americas four countries have
been declared free of the disease.
We want to start doing that in Africa, and
we should have started in Africa in 2018,
I left 2018 on the slide but
actually nothing has been done, so
we hope to celebrate in 2019,
that's where we want to be.
Then we have to look at a few principles
to answer the third question about
how to get there, how do we reach
the end game and what do we need to do?
We'll look at that under some of
the headings that you see on this slide.
