Raising awareness about eye donation among general public will help to reduce the demand and supply gap and achieving a target of one lakh corneal surgeries per year in India, according to Coimbatore Society of Ophthalmic Surgeons (CSOS).
India is now home to the world's largest number of blind people and of the 37 million blind across the globe,15 million are from India with 75 per cent of these cases are avoidable blindness, a statistics released by CSOS, during an Eye Donation Awareness Rally, here today.
Corneal diseases are major cause of visual loss after cataract and glaucoma and.
Penetrating keratoplasty is the most successful and most often performed tissue transplant which can treat this blindness, it said.
But the country is suffering an acute shortage of donated eyes for the treatment of corneal blindness with 80 per cent difference between the demand and the supply.
Out of 12 million blind in India, 10 lakh are due to corneal diseases, 26 per cent of whom are children.
Moreover, every year there is an addition of around 20,000 new cases, the statistics said.
However there are only 20,000 corneal transplants done every year due to unavailability of donor cornea, it claimed.
There is a wide variety of causes for corneal blindness including various infections, trauma, inflammatory eyes diseases, congenital diseases as well as traditional home remedies which often harm the eye rather than relieve pain/ improve sight.
Also, the causal factors vary with age, it said.
As Tamil Nadu topped the list for eye donation in India, closely followed by Gujarat and Maharashtra, lack of awareness and hesitation among the public, lack of quality corneas are the main reasons for lack of effective eye donation in India and creating awareness and implementing effective Hospital Cornea Retrieval Programs will be the answer for this bottleneck, it said.
To overcome the current scenario of eye donation it is of utmost importance to have a universal helpline number and extremely important to educate the senior citizens as well, CSOS said.
