Video Journalist Emma Cook travels to the Katherine West region of the Northern Territory, where the infectious eye disease trachoma is slowly on the rise.

Trachoma is one of the oldest diseases known to humankind. It's a type of chlymidia spread when a person comes in contact with discharge from an infected person's eye.

Have Your Say: Should governments target individual diseases like Trachoma or focus on improving overall Indigenous living standards?

In the 70's, the late Fred Hollows spearheaded a team of eye specialists, visiting more than 450 communities across Australia, in a bid to wipe out the disease. 30 years on and the disease is still prevalent and even on the increase in some remote communities.

Along the way, Cook visits the Kalkaringi Medical Service, which runs a screening program for school aged children. Senior health worker Robert Roy says a lot of people within the community miss out on trachoma screening because it's not included in their program.

"It's pretty scary when we got the feedback of how high trachoma is in our community" he says.

Meanwhile medical officers working in the community agree more needs to be done to tackle the disease, but say simply administering antibiotics, along with lessons on hygiene is not enough.

Andrew Bell from Katherine West Medical Board says the disease is an illness of poverty and social disadvantage and could be eliminated with significant improvements in living conditions.

Transcript

KG: It was considered a disgrace that the eye disease trachoma was still prevalent in Aboriginal communities in the 1970s when a national program was launched to eradicate the disease. 30 years on, an eye specialist revisited the Katherine West region of the NT to discover the Third World disease still remains in Aboriginal communities there. Video journalist Emma Cook with this report.

NEWSREEL VOICEOVER (1970s): Trachoma was the main aim of the program and it's slowly being eliminated.

Reporter: It was a national fight to rid Indigenous communities of a disease that had been eradicated from the non-Indigenous population at the start of the 20th Century. Renowned eye surgeon the late Fred Hollows led a team of eye specialists visiting more than 465 Indigenous communities across Australia in the late 1970s to wipe out the debilitating eye disease trachoma. Ophthalmologist Hugh Taylor was one of those eye specialists involved. Last year he revisited some of those communities he'd been to 30 years earlier in the Northern Territory.

Hugh Taylor, Ophthalmologist: We knew that 30 years ago that about a third of the kids would have trachoma and we were shocked to find that still, 30 years later, again about a third of the kids have trachoma. Equally in the old people there are people with the late stages of trachoma, with the inturned eyelashes that go on to cause blindness. And I was shocked in one community to find six people with this condition who'd not had treatment.

Reporter: That community was Kalkaringi, 480km west of Katherine in the heart of the Northern Territory's cattle country. Doctor Taylor says there are elderly men and women in the community going blind because the illness continues to go untreated.

Hugh Taylor: The tragedy of that was that the youngest person we saw with these inturned eyelashes was a woman of the age of 46. So that when Fred Hollows and I and the trachoma team had been there 30 years ago, she was a girl of 16, and since that time she's gone on and developed these blinding complications.

Reporter: Trachoma is one of the oldest diseases known to humankind. It's a type of chlamydia spread when a person comes in contact with discharge from an infected person's eye. Repeated infection can cause severe scarring to the point where eyelids can actually turn inward and rub on the cornea, resulting in blindness. Hugh Taylor says it's deplorable that Australia remains the only developed country in the world where it still exists.

Hugh Taylor: It disappeared from white Australia 100 years ago as our living standards improved. There were active programs in England, America, Japan and Europe that have eliminated trachoma from those communities 50 years ago and they didn't stop until the last case had disappeared. Today in developing countries, countries like Oman, Morocco and Iran have eliminated active trachoma from their populations over the last 5 to 10 years.

Reporter: The Kalkaringi Medical Service runs a screening program for school-aged children only. One of its senior health workers says Hugh Taylor's visit last year was the first time in a long time that the entire community had been screened.

Robert Roy, Kalkaringi Health Centre: We do have annually treated with antibiotics tablets, two tablets, but otherwise a lot of the other people misses out on trachoma screening because it's not actually included in our program to do at all, so the whole community.

Reporter: Robert Roy says there's simply not enough funding to screen the entire community. During the election campaign, Federal Labor promised $22.5 million to fight preventable blindness in South-East Asia and the Pacific region. Trachoma was singled out as one of the Third World diseases Labor would target in its commitment to improving Indigenous health, but unlike the Asia-Pacific pledge, there was no mention of how much money would be involved.

Hugh Taylor: We've estimated that you need about $25 million over five years to eliminate all the causes of avoidable blindness in Aboriginal communities. That includes trachoma, diabetic eye disease, unoperated cataracts and people who just need a pair of glasses. The component of trachoma itself is about $18.5 million, and if a country like Niger, which is the poorest country in Africa, last year in 2007 treated over 6.5 million of its people, we could surely get out and treat the 60,000 or so Australian Aboriginal people who need treatment for trachoma.

Reporter: Doctor Taylor is proposing a one-off blitz that would see antibiotics distributed to all affected communities over a 5-year period. He will also be recommending that communities are taught facial cleanliness to prevent reinfection. But while those working in Kalkaringi agree more needs to be done to tackle trachoma, they feel simply administering the two antibiotics required, along with a lesson on keeping faces clean, is not enough.

Andrew Bell, Katherine West Medical Board: Trachoma is an illness of poverty and social disadvantage and it disappeared from the rest of Australia without antibiotics but with improvements in living conditions. I mean, there are many factors involved in the high prevalence of trachoma that are beyond the scope of health services. We can monitor environmental health, we can advise, we can have a small influence on our environmental health in our communities.

Reporter: Hugh Taylor agrees that an integrated approach would be ideal, but believes that ridding Aboriginal communities of a disease like trachoma should become a primary concern.

Hugh Taylor: I think that trachoma is seen as a competing priority with all the other priorities. And respiratory infection is important and renal disease is important, diabetes is important, and all these things are important, but here is something that we can actually eliminate, we know how to do it, it's achievable, it's been done in our white communities, it's been done overseas and it's relatively cheap and that's why it needs to be given the higher priority.

Reporter: What they all agree on is that 15 years on from his death, Fred Hollow's vision of a trachoma-free Australia remains elusive.

Andrew Bell: I think 20 years ago there was a very high level of awareness amongst health staff of trachoma and there was a trachoma program. I think in recent years there has been less awareness of trachoma and I think that's resulted in some loss of skills in clinically recognising it or loss of awareness of it as a problem.

Hugh Taylor: The first time it really hit me was about 10 years ago when I went back to Jigalong, one of the communities in Western Australia where the rates of trachoma, when I'd first been there in the 1970s, was 68%. And when I went back 20 years later to the month, the rate of trachoma that the community told me was 72%. And that shock me to the core. What has happened? You won't find any communities in the world with rates as high as that except in some of the mountain villages in Ethiopia. So what are we doing in Australia?

KG: That story was filmed and reported by Emma Cook. And if you'd like to have your say on this issue, visit our website. This week we're asking, should governments target individual diseases like trachoma or focus on improving overall Indigenous living standards? And we'd like to thank viewers for their response to last week's story on the safe house run by Barbara Shaw in Alice Springs. If you'd like to assist Barbara, go to our website for more details. Still to come on Living Black - the country's first Indigenous online dating service.