Onchocerciasis Control Programme

A regional campaign that ran from 1974 to 2002 across eleven countries of West Africa's river basins to control onchocerciasis (river blindness), a disease spread by blackflies breeding in fast-flowing rivers. It was sponsored jointly by the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization and the United Nations Development Programme. Its first phase relied on aerial and ground larviciding of blackfly breeding sites; from 1988 it added mass distribution of ivermectin, donated by Merck, which kills the parasite's larvae in the human body. The programme is credited with preventing an estimated 600,000 cases of blindness and returning roughly 25 million hectares of fertile river-basin farmland, previously abandoned out of fear of the disease, to cultivation and resettlement.