The Fred Hollows Foundation announced yesterday that it had won a contract for the sale of 10,000 lens to a Vietnamese charity to enable cataract blind people who are too poor to pay for surgery to have their sight restored.
About 750,000 people are unnecessarily blind in Vietnam with cataracts. The Fred Hollows Foundation has been training Vietnamese ophthalmologists to train their colleagues to do the operation to insert the lens which are made by Hollows factories in Eritrea and Nepal at a cost of about $10 each, compared to about $300 for lens made in developed countries. In 1992 only about 100 operations were done in Vietnam. Now there are 40,000 a year.
The foundation will sell the lenses (on a cost-recovery basis) to the Sponsorial Association Free Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City.
The foundation hopes to set up a factory to produce the lens in Vietnam.
The foundation is a non-profit organisation and is supported by the Australian Government through Ausaid.
Let there be sight — Panorama.