Problem of blindness linked to poverty – Health Minister

Feb 07, 2010 News

Sight lost is a major contributor to poverty and therefore must be an issue that is addressed on the global developmental agenda.

This notion was emphasised by Minister of Health, Dr Leslie Ramsammy, when he addressed the gathering at the launch of Caribbean Vision 2020 initiative last Tuesday at the Princess International Hotel.

The venture is being funded by the European Commission and is intended to facilitate the start of a five-year eye health project through the Caribbean Council for the Blind (CCB) and associated agencies which will benefit a number of Caribbean Countries including Guyana.

Minister of Health, Dr Leslie Ramsammy

Aside from the efforts of the various vision oriented organisations, the Minister opined that if examined closely, in all of the scholarship programmes and all aid packages, there is either little or nothing about ophthalmology, optometry and factors relating to eye health.

“If we look at the definition of the essential package of medicine and medical supplies you will be alarmed or ought to be alarmed at how much commodities for the preservation of sight are missing.

“If anything at all, the launch of the Caribbean Vision 2020 should be a call for the correction of this anomaly,” the Minister appealed. And not only is the lack of support to eye care an anomaly, the Minister highlighted that it is also a tragedy as sight lost is a major contributor to poverty.

“If we are going to address the issue of poverty we must address the issue of eye care as well,” Dr Ramsammy warned.

But though efforts have been made to be innovative in the face of vision-related challenges, he asserted that the Millennium Development Goals have missed many of the things that contribute to poverty.

He cited chronic diseases as not been included in the MDG despite the fact that it is among the top five causes of death in the world. According to the Minister, 350 million people living with visual impairment and more than 50 million living with blindness cannot be merely considered a trivial global problem.

“We have to fit addressing this problem as a global challenge within the MDG of the reduction of poverty. It deserves its own space…the challenge and the problems of sight preservation and the prevention of sight lost should occupy its own priority space on the development agenda.”

And in order to effectively tackle this challenge, the Minister emphasised that there is an urgency to also address the need for human resource. He highlighted that in Guyana the number of persons that work in the area of sight preservation, the prevention of sight lost, diagnosis and provision of services is not higher than 30.

Currently, there are no more than seven in-country ophthalmologists to provide services for some 750,000 people. Of these seven practitioners only five conduct surgeries, according to the Minister.

“If you work out the numbers, we have between five and seven thousand people living with blindness and we have just over 50,000 people living with visual impairment. When we talk about these numbers we are not making them up. They are there for you and me to see…”

Dr Ramsammy recounted that when he first took up the reigns as the Minister of Health, there were more than 12,000 people on record who required surgery for cataract, a surgical intervention that was already routine in many parts of the world.

However, at that time Guyana was only capable of doing approximately three to four hundred cataract surgeries locally. “At that time only about 800 to 1,000 new cataract diagnoses were being made so every year we were adding another 900 people to the register of those going blind because cataract is an easily corrected malady,” he noted.

But according to Dr Ramsammy, he is today thrilled that the public health sector has been able to reduce that number to the incidence level of about 800 to 1,000 at any point of time. This development he regards as a massive achievement and a major success story for Guyana. And in order to further boost the system in the near future, he said that one Guyanese is currently being trained in Paraguay compliments of Eye Care Guyana and another is being trained in Bangladesh. In addition, a Bachelors of Science Degree Programme in ophthalmology is set to commence in September at the University of Guyana.

And it was through working with the CCB that the Health Ministry was able to introduce a Refractionists Training Programme, which according to Dr Ramsammy will remain part of the menu of training programmes that are offered locally.

“We have been thrilled to host this programme and we have been delighted that we were able to host students from Jamaica and St Lucia and we welcome more students from the Caribbean. We will work to keep the programme affordable so that students can come,” the Minister added.

He said that just a few agencies will not be enough to accomplish the fundamental human rights of eye care but rather a more diverse partnership is critical including that of Faith Based Organisations, Civil Society Organisations, Technical Agencies and Governments to promote education and awareness of services available.