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News:
Celebrating 10 years of Tropical Data! (2026)
For a decade, Tropical Data has worked in partnership with countries to deliver high-quality, standardised prevalence surveys for trachoma and other neglected tropical diseases.
Over the past 10 years, Tropical Data has: • Supported 55 countries • Surveyed 4,109 districts • Examined more than 13 million people • Trained 2,400+ graders and recorders (1,200+ teams) • Certified and refreshed nearly 300 trainers across 12 international Training of Trainers workshops
On average, one person is examined for trachoma every 26 seconds with Tropical Data’s support. These surveys provide the evidence countries need to target interventions and measure their progress towards trachoma elimination.
To celebrate, we have put together the following Storymap to highlight some of our key achievements. We hope you enjoy reading it and we look forward to our continuing collaboration.
Trachoma is the world’s leading infectious cause of blindness. The Tropical Data service is playing a vital role in supporting countries to eliminate this painful and debilitating condition.
We work with health ministries to support surveys in order to collect high-quality, standardised data on the prevalence of trachoma and other neglected tropical diseases. These data help countries prioritise and focus their disease elimination efforts in the right places.
So far, Tropical Data and its predecessor, the Global Trachoma Mapping Project, have supported surveys for trachoma in more than 50 countries globally. Of those, 15 countries have gone on to eliminate the disease. And we’re committed to helping many more countries reach this amazing milestone.
India was validated by the World Health Organization (WHO) as having eliminated trachoma in 2024. Dr. V. Rajshekhar, a Deputy Commissioner in India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, said: ‘We are incredibly grateful to the Tropical Data team for the wonderful and timely support they provided throughout our surveys and dossier preparation. Their expertise and dedication were instrumental in achieving our trachoma elimination milestone. Without their support, this accomplishment would not have been possible.’
The Tropical Data team are also developing new services that can support countries on their journey to eliminating trachoma. For example, the team are currently piloting the inclusion of finger-prick blood testing, or ‘serological testing’, within the survey process. This method can help countries to understand transmission intensity of Chlamydia trachomatis, the bacteria that cause trachoma. This can be helpful because examination for clinical signs sometimes becomes less useful close to the elimination point.
Finger-prick blood testing can also be used to test for exposure or immunity to multiple infections at once, helping to reduce survey costs and increase efficiency. This type of integration across health programmes has been identified as a priority within the road map for Neglected Tropical Diseases 2021 – 2030, published by WHO.
