German NGO helps restore poor people's sight
Tantri Yuliandini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Rosada, 64, appeared anxious as she waited her turn in the surgery of the Universitas Kristen Indonesia (UKI) Hospital in East Jakarta.
Accompanied by her daughter, Rosada has come all the way from Pintu Air in Central Jakarta because she heard there was cheap cataract surgery available at the hospital.
For only Rp 500,000 (about US$50) and a letter from her community leader, Rosada will be able to have a cataract removed from her left eye and have her sight restored. The normal price of cataract surgery is between Rp 4 million and Rp 7 million.
"I'm an old woman. I was resigned to the fate of being half- blind when I heard about this program. I would never have been able to raise the money for surgery otherwise," Rosada explained.
A cataract is an opacity on the lens of the eye that blocks light from entering and thus causes blindness. It is mainly caused by aging, but can also result from low nutrition intake and a lot of exposure to sunlight.
In Indonesia, cataracts are the single biggest cause of blindness, and at 1.5 percent of the population, the country also has the highest prevalence of blindness in the region.
On the other hand, cataract surgery is a relatively simple -- though highly sensitive -- procedure that takes only 20 to 30 minutes to conduct. But with only about 800 ophthalmologists in the country -- 25 percent of those in Jakarta and 68 percent in Java -- very few people are operated on.
"In 2003 alone, the backlog of people who are blind due to cataracts is about 1.5 million, and this is rapidly growing," the head of UKI's ophthalmology division, J.H.A. Mandang, told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.
He said that currently the country's ophthalmologists were only able to conduct 350 cataract operations per million people per year, while the ideal cataract surgical rate (CSR) for a densely populated country such as Indonesia is 3,000.
Germany-based non-governmental organization Christian Blind Mission International (CBMI) has cooperated with various institutions in Indonesia since 1978 to prevent and cure blindness, including Airlangga University and the Ministry of Health.
It began providing low-cost cataract operations in collaboration with the UKI Hospital in 1994.
"We started fairly simple, but now have five professional ophthalmologists, and have treated more than 600 patients this year," said Mandang, who is also CBMI's regional office advisor for Indonesia.
He expects other hospitals and ophthalmologists to follow suit in the hope of bringing the number of blind people down to 1.5 million in 2020 in line with the World Health Organization (WHO)'s Vision 2020 global initiative, which Indonesia joined in 2000.
Vitreo-retinal surgeon Gilbert W.S. Simanjuntak, a volunteer ophthalmologist at the UKI Hospital, said that despite the charitable nature of the program, the technology and expertise provided at the hospital were quite advanced.
For Rp 500,000, a cataract patient is given a manual extracapsular cataract extraction (ECCE), where the lens of the eye is removed while the elastic capsule that covers the lens is left partially intact to allow implantation of an intraocular lens (IOL). With this procedure, patients no longer need to use thick eyeglasses or contact lenses as in the case of older procedures.
"We have quite a high success rate here, and patients may even get 100 percent of their eyesight back provided they have no other complications such as glaucoma," Gilbert said.