A large number of patients comprising men, women and children from different part of Niamey and surrounding villages reached the hospital for an opportunity for free consultation and cataract surgery as applicable. The voluntary Tunisian doctors and support technicians worked hand in hand with the local team of medical staff.
More than 1000 consultations and more than 400 cataract surgeries are expected to be conducted during the one week campaign. According to the local doctors, the hospital generally conducts between 10 to 15 cataract operations per week, whereas, with the presence of a number of doctors with the IDB help, the campaign will witness around 80 operations per day. Those who do not require surgery will be provided relevant medicine free of charge.
The IDB recently completed a similar campaign in Burkina Faso. This campaign is part of a new IDB initiative known as “Alliance to Fight Avoidable Blindness” to restore sight to at least 50,000 persons suffering from cataract. The benefitting member countries of this initiative are Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Djibouti, Guinea, Mali and Niger.
Blindness, especially due to cataract, represents a serious public health, economic and social problem affecting more than 650,000 individuals in these IDB member countries. Due to poverty and lack adequate of health facilities, the majority of those individuals generally remains blind or dies before getting an opportunity to undergo proper treatment. It is in this context that the IDB Avoidable Blindness Campaign hopes to bring light into the lives of people and thus create a more favorable economic as well as social condition prevail within the country through the provision of better medical care.