British researchers working in an East African village say a single dose of an antibiotic appears to stop infections that cause trachoma, the world’s leading preventable cause of blindness. After treating most of the village with azithromycin, the “prevalence and intensity of infection fell dramatically,” said Anthony Soloman, the study’s lead author. The village remained virtually disease-free for two years, he said, suggesting that the method might work like a vaccine to break the infection cycle. Details of the study appear in Thursday’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
