Onchocerciasis and trachoma control: what has changed in the past two decades?

Trachoma and onchocerciasis are the two major infectious causes of blindness worldwide. Twenty years ago, the possibility of achieving worldwide and long-term control of these ancient scourges seemed remote and existing control programmes were deemed to have limited prospects. The picture is very different today: large-scale interventions to control both diseases are not only expanding, but control and even elimination are now being discussed as real achievable goals in a growing number of countries. As we will show in this mainly programmatic review, this is a remarkable achievement over only two decades!