ABOVE: A young child receives a single dose of azithromycin or placebo in the Boboye district in Niger as part of a new trial continuing the work published this week.
DOMINIQUE CATTON
In the mid-2000s, researchers conducted a clinical trial in Ethiopia to see what it would take to eliminate trachoma, a disease caused by the bacterium Chlamydia trachomatis and the most common cause of blindness from infection worldwide. They randomly gave one- to 10-year-old kids either the antibiotic azithromycin to clear and prevent infection or delayed their treatment until after the trial ended.
There were far fewer cases of trachoma among those treated—but also fewer deaths, even though trachoma is not a lethal disease. “The communities with delayed treatment had twice the childhood mortality as the communities that were treated,” says University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), ophthalmologist Thomas Lietman, the senior author of the 2009 study that reported the ...
