A shamed nation turns a blind eye
Trachoma is a eye disease that starts as conjunctivitis but gradually, with repeated infection, turns the eyelashes inwards so that they scrape the cornea, scarring it, rendering it opaque, causing blindness. As it is easily treated with antibiotics, trachoma is regarded as a disease of poverty and is now unknown in developed countries – except Australia.
Even in the developing world – in Gambia, Malawi and Nepal, where it was once endemic – trachoma and trichiasis (the eye-scraping stage) have all but disappeared. Ghana, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Morocco and Oman all now report the disease eliminated. In Australia’s chattering fringes it is also unknown.
But in Katherine, almost a quarter of the children aged five to 15 test positive to trachoma. Without treatment, they’ll go blind. The official incidence in this country is 20,000 among children alone, and that’s just the ones we know about. In more remote areas, cases are often simply unrecorded.
How can this be? How in a nation where the rich and their physicians habitually rort the system to cheat Medicare out of exorbitant cosmetic procedures, in the very nation that produced and reveres Fred Hollows, can avoidable blindness still be rife? Why does the simple fact of it not embarrass us to the point of excruciation, as if it were our eyeballs being grated?
Well, perhaps it does. Perhaps we’re so embarrassed we can’t think about it. So embarrassed we’re happy for the Federal Government to toss yet another $58.3 million at the problem, as it did in February, and hope it’ll go away.
This is a strategy you might call voluntary avoidable blindness. It is abetted by our extraordinarily vivid concept of the continent as a vast, vacant interior ringed (or perhaps girt) by a fertile, febrile megalopolitan fringe where most of us live, deafened by our own frantic chatter.
But it’s a strategy that is unlikely to work. For it isn’t just trachoma, or even just health. It’s housing, hygiene, violence, infant mortality, substance abuse, sexual abuse, education, employment, home ownership, life expectancy, wealth and diet. Across all the parameters, even according to the official Council of Australian Governments report Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage: Key Indicators 2009, things indigenous are stagnating or getting worse.