Corneal Donations Can Save Thousands of Blind People: Al-Shifa

News Desk

Rawalpindi: President of the Al-Shifa Trust, Maj Gen (retd) Rehmat Khan, said on Monday that Corneal’s contributions had the potential to provide a fresh lease on life to thousands of people.

Addressing the media, he disclosed that approximately 9,000 individuals were on the trust’s waiting list for corneal transplants, while the trust receives 800 corneal donations annually.

Rehmat Khan highlighted a significant disparity between the supply and demand of corneas worldwide, including in Pakistan, where corneal blindness contributes to up to 15 percent of all blindness cases.

He urged the public to consider corneal donation, noting that in the past thirty years, only two individuals had donated corneas due to various reasons causing reluctance among people.

He informed me that Americans provide corneal donations for Pakistani patients because residents were reluctant to volunteer for this charitable endeavor.

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Rehmat said that, in August 2018, the first-ever eye bank was formed at the trust’s Rawalpindi premises with the assistance of the American organization EverSight, where individuals can submit their wills to donate corneas.

He continued by saying that as the corneal donations in the country were so few and 53 percent of eye patients lacked access to donate corneas, corneas had to be imported from the USA and Sri Lanka.

A cornea is one of the simplest tissues to transplant because the donor and recipient do not need to match, he said, adding that it is a bloodless tissue that absorbs oxygen straight from the atmosphere.

He further said that corneas from the elderly can be removed and transplanted into the eyes of much younger people. Rehmat Khan said that the Al-Shifa Trust had begun corneal transplants at its Sukkar hospital in addition to its Rawalpindi facility.

In Sukkur Hospital, 50 corneal transplants have been completed successfully to date, free of charge.

He informed me that eighty percent of surgeries performed at the Al-Shifa eye hospitals in Rawalpindi, Sukkar, Kohat, Muzaffarabad, and Chakwal were free of charge, while the trust had carried out around one million different eye surgeries so far.