El Salvador just beat the world's leading infectious cause of blindness

Trachoma — an eye infection spread through poor sanitation that scars eyelids shut — has been beaten in El Salvador. The World Health Organization validated its elimination as a public-health problem in July 2026, making the country the first in Central America and only the second in the Americas to do it. Years of community-by-community surveys, led by thousands of local health workers, found no active transmission in children and no blinding cases in adults.