Flying hospital to help India's blind population

The world's only flying eye hospital is on a two-week mission to India to perform free surgeries and train eye care personnel in India. India has the world's largest blind population. An estimated 75 percent of India's 12 million blind people suffer from avoidable blindness because of limited eye care infrastructure that has only one eye surgeon per 100,000 people. Every four minutes an Indian child goes blind, which is preventable. Blindness prevalence in India is a little above 1.1 percent with being the main reason for loss of sight in most people. According to Indian authorities a national programme to control blindness is expected to reach its blindness elimination target of 0.3 percent by 2015, five years before the World Health Organisation deadline of 2020. But this can be achieved only if India has more eye care personnel. Orbis, an international nonprofit Organisation focusing on preventing blindness in developing countries operates the flying hospital on a converted DC-10 jet and has treated more than four million people in 80 countries, over the last 25 years. The aircraft has operation theatres, patient waiting space, a consultation room, a technical support area and a training room. Besides performing dozens of free eye surgeries, Orbis doctors have been training hundreds of Indian doctors, nurses and eye care technicians to spread awareness about blindness in rural India, which accounts for about 80 percent of the country's blind population. Orbis doctors said their focus was paediatric ophthalmology as more than 320,000 children in India suffer from avoidable blindness.