German NGO helps restore poor people's sight

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.