NLIGHTENMENT East Meets West
by Brooke Herron
W
ith more than 1 billion people, India has the second largest population in the world. In a region where access to healthcare services can be limited in most rural and underserved areas, more people means more potential patients. This is especially true for cataract, which is the most significant cause of blindness and is responsible for 50% to 80% of bilateral blindness in India.1 It is well known that India experienced a severe cataract backlog in the past, but through government and non-government organization (NGO)-sponsored programs, that number has decreased tremendously. Through the sheer volume of surgeries performed, Indian ophthalmologists have refined their surgical technique for efficacy and
efficiency, with an emphasis on safety. To learn more, CAKE Magazine caught up with Prof. Dr. S. Natarajan, the All Indian Ophthalmological Society (AIOS) president, and head and consultant of Vitreo-Retinal Surgery at Aditya Jyot Eye Hospital in Mumbai, India, at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Retina Specialists (ASRS) in Chicago. There, he discussed India’s past and present – and how European ophthalmologists can learn from their Indian counterparts.
A look back: India’s cataract backlog In the 1970s, increasing rates of treatable blindness due to cataract caught the Indian government’s
attention. And in 1976, the National Programme for Control of Blindness and Visual Impairment (NPCB&VI) was launched. At that time, the NPCB&VI was 100% government-sponsored, with the goal of reducing the prevalence of blindness to 0.3% by 2020. “They did a lot of camps to identify cataract in the small places like schools,” said Dr. Natarajan, adding that now the camps are done in hospitals. “This started in the early 1960s and then it picked up in the 1970s. In the ‘60s, they were doing intracapsular cataract extraction (ICCE).” During this time, Dr. Natarajan said they increased the number of cataract surgeons to help handle the backlog. Government incentives also created an initiative for surgeons to
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September/October 2019
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