Dubai team gives the gift of sight

Dubai: Noor Dubai Foundation, the UAE based charity focused on preventing and treating low vision and curable forms of blindness, continues to provide assistance to those affected by the 2010 floods in Pakistan Sindh Province.

The mobile eye camp that Noor Dubai conducts in Pakistan this time has been set up in the village of Kandiaro, south of the Sindh Province.

Kandiaro, a small town in the southern province of Pakistan, also a major town of the Naushehro Feroz district was affected by flooding of the River Indus. The Naushehro Feroze district has a population of 8.97 million people. This is the second Noor Dubai mobile eye camp in Pakistan since the flood emergency was declared in mid of 2010.

The camp in Kandiaro started early this week and managed to screen more than 2,000 individuals and provide more than 300 cataract and glaucoma surgeries.

Noor Dubai, the latest global charitable initiative from Dubai, was launched by His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, on September 3, 2008, with the aim of delivering preventative eye care to more than one million people around the world.

Screening patients

The camp is expected to continue until later this week as residents have started arriving from neighbouring villages as well. The Noor Dubai Foundation staff also provide transport buses to and from those villages, making it easier for locals and villagers to attend for the needed eye care.

Ophthalmologists and medical staff from Noor Dubai are travelling to neighbouring villages to conduct post-operative follow-up examinations and eye checks and they will also screen patients unable to travel to the camp in Kandiaro.

Qadi Saeed Al Murooshid, chairman of the board of trustees at the Noor Dubai Foundation, said: "Noor Dubai is committed to providing its services to areas of need especially those that were devastated by natural disasters such as in Pakistan.

"The Kandiaro camp is Noor Dubai's fourth Camp in Pakistan since its inception in 2008, and the medical team provides comprehensive eye care services to the people of Kandiaro and neighbouring villages. Noor Dubai has organised four out-patient clinics where the youngest patient screened was a two-month-old baby and the eldest patient eligible for surgery was 80 years old."

Major health problems

Dr Manal Taryam, CEO of the Foundation said: "According to the statistics provided by the World Health Organisation, Blindness is one of the major health problems in Pakistan draining both its human and economic resources.

"Around 1.5 million people are blind and four per cent of the world's blind people live in Pakistan.

"Approximately 1.2 million of the 1.5 million blind people could be cured if appropriate services for the blind would be more widely distributed."

According to the World Health Organisation, the cataract surgical rate, in Pakistan, is 1,875 per one million people in 2006.

Scope of aid

Since it was established in 2008, Noor Dubai has so far restored the vision of more than 5.8 million people in Pakistan, Sudan, Yemen, Chad, Niger, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, Mali, Uganda, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Palestine, Iraq, Jordan, Oman, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. The Foundation has performed cataract surgeries for more than 10,000 individuals, and provided medication and corrective eye wear to more than 90,000 people through the eye camps. Noor Dubai has funded, in 2008 and 2009, the fight against river blindness and other causes of preventable vision loss in Africa.

The group also works with partners and other NGOs. Together, they have led a series of highly successful free cataract camps which have focused on screening, diagnostics and corrective treatment across South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.