Timor-Leste has eliminated trachoma, and cleared it from an entire WHO region

Trachoma blinds slowly. Repeated infection scars the inside of the eyelid until the lashes turn inward and scrape the eye, a late stage called trichiasis, and the disease spreads wherever clean water and sanitation are scarce. On 3 September 2026 the World Health Organization validated Timor-Leste as having eliminated trachoma as a public health problem, the 33rd country to reach that mark. It was also the last country in WHO's South-East Asia Region where trachoma still counted as one, so the region as a whole is now clear of it.

How we know

The evidence is a 2025 survey that tested 4,949 samples from children aged 1 to 5 across all 13 of Timor-Leste's municipalities. It found no transmission at a level needing trachoma-specific action. Earlier investigations, run between 2015 and 2017, examined children on Atauro Island, screened patients at eye clinics nationwide and searched house to house. They found no cases. Elimination as a public health problem is a threshold rather than a finish line: WHO asks that untreated cases of inturned eyelashes be rarer than one adult in 500, and that the early inflammatory sign in children aged 1 to 9 stay below 5 percent for two years without mass antibiotic treatment.

Why it matters

Trachoma is a disease of poverty, so clearing it means a country has reached its poorest communities with clean water, sanitation and eye care. Timor-Leste is the 33rd country validated worldwide and the fourth in its region. WHO's Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, described clearing the region as a significant step toward the global target of ending trachoma by 2030. Timor-Leste keeps the capacity to find and treat individual cases of trichiasis through the National Eye Centre at Hospital Nacional Guido Valadares, and folds trachoma watching into the surveillance systems it already runs. Elimination is a threshold a country has to keep standing on, not a line it crosses once.