Who knew that little bits of plastic windshield embedded in people’s eyes could turn out to be a good thing? Sir Harold Ridley, a British ophthalmologist, saw WWII pilots who had pieces of shattered windshields in their eyes and noticed that the plastic shards were inert. He performed the first cataract surgery with an intraocular lens (IOL) in 1949. IOLs are human-made lenses that are used to replace clouded natural lenses in cataract surgery. The first lenses used were made of glass, they were heavy and were prone to shatter; Sir Harold’s observation led to the use of plastic materials. For decades, cataract surgery using intraocular lenses was out of reach for the developing world, because of the cost of the lenses. Patients who had cataract surgeries in poor countries were forced to wear thick, cumbersome glasses which, if lost or broken, meant they returned to near blindness. Seva Foundation board member, David Green, is another visionary. He says if you truly want to serve as many people as possible, analyze the most expensive item involved and then figure out how much it really costs to make. Start making it more affordably. Repeat. The solution was to do a technology transfer to India, with the help of Seva Canada and CIDA, so that IOLs could be made at a tiny fraction of the cost in the West. Thus Aurolab was born in 1992 and has since supplied more than 5 million lenses to its customers in India and more than 120 other countries worldwide. The cost of IOLs came down from over $300 to about $5 each. Good news!

This Nepali woman was seen at a recent Seva eye camp in Doti. Notice her broken glasses and mature cataract.