Creative way to treat Cataracts.
What affects 20 million people, robs the global economy of billions of dollars and can be fixed with a five-minute procedure?
The answer is cataract blindness. The disease, which begins with clouding of the eyes and can lead to loss of vision without treatment, will probably afflict 12 million more people by 2020, as a shortage of skilled doctors limits access to care in developing nations, according to the Rand Corporation.
Jim Ueltschi wants to change that. Through his nonprofit HelpMeSee, he wants to train 30,000 people for a procedure to remove the impairment using a virtual-reality simulator that replicates the human eye and feel of live surgery. Restoring vision to the “avoidably blind,” as the afflicted are often described, could inject $517 billion into the world’s poor economies over a decade at a cost of $128 billion, according to reports by PricewaterhouseCoopers commissioned by the Fred Hollows Foundation.