Students in Port Vila, Vanuatu. ©WHO/Yoshi ShimizuContributions to WHO have helped Vanuatu become the first Pacific island country to eliminate a disease that causes blindness, improve the safety of Mongolia’s food supply, and fight a deadly liver disease in Viet Nam.On islands across the Pacific, emergency medical teams are learning to quickly set up and run field hospitals, children are catching up on the routine vaccinations they missed during the COVID-19 pandemic and new drowning-prevention measures have been put place in countries around the world.Read on for these stories and moreRelated: The Asia Pacific Parliamentarian Forum on Global Health focuses on strengthening health security and is a platform for parliamentarians to exchange ideas, build political will, strengthen capacity and foster collaboration towards sustainable action for health.Vanuatu eliminates trachoma, the world’s leading cause of blindness Epidemiological surveys in 2014 showed that 12% of children ages 1-9 in Vanuatu had active trachoma.
The statistic sparked an aggressive effort that succeeded in eliminating the disease. Above, schoolchildren break for lunch in Port Vila, Vanuatu. ©UNICEF/Bobby ShingVanuatu announced in August that it was the first Pacific island country to eliminate trachoma, a neglected tropical disease that can cause blindness.“To understand the magnitude of this feat, just imagine what it must take to reach people across all of Vanuatu’s inhabited islands – taking boats across open ocean and walking for hours through creeks and over hills in all kinds of weather,” said WHO Regional Director for the Western Pacific Dr Takeshi Kasai. “My heartfelt congratulations go out to Vanuatu for this tremendous achievement.”WHO is