No one should go blind from a disease that is preventable

Ilove travelling and I’d go mad if I wasn’t able to do it. But no matter how different the people I’m visiting appear to be, underneath we are exactly the same. We love our families, value our health and want to live the most enjoyable life we can.

In 2005, I travelled with Sightsavers to Bangladesh, where I watched as Arif, 5, saw his mother for the first time after having cataracts removed.

I returned eight years later, and found Arif happily attending school, a far cry from the boy who used to sit, inactive, in front of his family home.

My involvement with Sightsavers started 20 years ago when I saw an advertisement about trachoma, an excruciating disease that can cause irreversible blindness and mostly affects people in developing countries.

It starts as a bacterial infection and can be treated with a simple dose of antibiotics. It is spread by flies and human touch, meaning that mothers wiping the faces of their children might accidentally pass the infection on.

If it is untreated it can turn into trichiasis, which makes a person’s eyelashes turn inward so they scratch the surface of the eye. Every blink causes pain and eventually, blindness. It prevents children learning, parents working, and traps whole communities in a cycle of poverty.

Trachoma affects people in 39 countries around the world but we are now closer than ever to ending the disease for good.

I am proud of the UK’S leading role in this. Between 2012 and 2015, the Department for International Development (DFID) supported the largest infectious disease mapping survey in history, the Global Trachoma Mapping Project.

This revealed the exact locations of the disease, pinpointing where treatment programmes were (and still are) needed. Thanks to this, the end of trachoma is now in sight for Uganda, Mozambique and Malawi.

In April, the UK government announced £20million of funding to boost efforts to eliminate trachoma in 10 Commonwealth countries. This will enable 5.5million people to access antibiotics and up to 76,000 people to have sight-saving surgery.

At the pace we’re going, the world will see the end of trachoma in just a few years. Nobody should go blind from a disease that can be avoided, or watch a loved one endure the pain of an easily preventable condition.