Biannual Antibiotics May Cut Major Cause of Blindness in Africa

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Biannual coverage of a large portion of the community may be necessary to eliminate infection from a severely affected community or at least to do so in a timely manner. Although programs may be reluctant to devote their scarce resources to more frequent treatment, this may be more cost-effective in the long term. Local elimination of the ocular strains of chlamydia from villages is a feasible goal but may require biannual distributions in hyperendemic areas. The results of this study confirm models that suggest treatments will need to be given for more than the two years to predictably achieve elimination in more than 95 percent of villages. Whether elimination from a larger area is possible will depend on the frequency of community-to-community transmission, the authors concluded.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about chlamydia.