It takes a village—a global village—to improve health care around the world. That's why Dr. Matt Oliva has joined with the Himalayan Cataract Project (HCP) to promote self-sufficient eye care in impoverished nations by restoring eyesight to thousands in Africa and teaching African doctors to do the same.
Dr. Oliva teamed up with HCP and the Earth Institute at Columbia University on the Millenium Villages Project, which involves finding the most cost effective health, agriculture, and education interventions in order to help rural African villages lift themselves out of poverty and meet the millennium development goals set forth by the United Nations.
As part of this effort Dr. Oliva traveled to western Kenya for a week conducting comprehensive eye care programs. Working with Kenyan ophthalmologist, Dr. Ciku Mathenge and her team of Kenyan ophthalmic nurses, Dr. Oliva performed cataract surgery, examined the 5,000 members of the village, treated a variety of eye diseases, mass treated for Vitamin A deficiency, and provided glasses for patients who needed them.
Sauri, Kenya is a farming community plagued by hunger, AIDS, and malaria. Between sixty and seventy percent of the population live on less than a dollar per day. With limited access to medical care and poverty preventing residents from buying what little medicine is available, malnutrition and poor health run rampant.
After completing his work in Sauri, Dr. Oliva traveled to Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, to host a corneal transplant workshop with Dr. Dan Kiage, a corneal specialist at Aga Khan Hospital. The ten corneas provided for transplantation during Dr. Oliva's trip come from the SightLife eye bank in Seattle, which provides the tissue used in MEC's corneal transplants. SightLife is in the process of establishing a functioning eye bank in Kenya to support the massive need for corneal transplantation.
Back in Medford, Medical Eye Center welcomed Rwandan doctor John Nkurikiye who spent 10 days observing MEC doctors and learning more about modern eye care techniques. Dr. Nkurikiye's visit is part of the HCP American-standard residency training program in ophthalmology, established in 2004. This program is a joint effort of the Tilganga Eye Centre and the Nepal Eye Hospital under the National Academy of Medical Sciences. It is designed to train young ophthalmologists to operate at the highest international level of ophthalmology and adheres to the curriculum established by the American Academy of Ophthalmology.
Dr. Nkurikiye is the most well trained and proficient ophthalmologist in Rwanda. His trip to America involved a three-month long corneal fellowship. In addition to his stay at MEC, he spent two months at the Moran Eye Center in Utah and a week at SightLife in Seattle, to learn more about eye banking. SightLife is in the process of starting an eye bank in Rwanda so that Dr. Nkurikiye will have corneas available to treat the large burden of corneal blindness.