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SINGAPORE: Patients in Singapore and across Asia seeking a cornea transplant now have a higher chance of finding a suitable donor.
Doctors in Singapore are working on a slew of initiatives costing over $5 million to pool more cornea donations within the region. Their efforts are expected to lower the cost of a transplant.
64-year-old Anne Ruck is from the UK but has been living in Jakarta for over 25 years.
She was diagnosed with shingles in the eye and after her condition worsened, she underwent a cornea transplant at the Singapore National Eye Centre.
Anne Ruck says: "It started about a year ago. I had this excruciating headache in my eye, very, very painful, lasted a few days, and then my vision started to go, then it just got a point where it seemed as though my cornea gave up, I think there has just been too much that happened, so I started to improve a bit and it just got worse. So it really came to the point where I really needed surgery."
It's understood that Anne's donor was from the US.
Most patients in Singapore receive corneas donated from the US, while only 30-40 per cent of them receive corneas from local donors.
Doctors feel it's time to be more self-sufficient.
Professor Donald Tan, medical director, Singapore Eye Bank & Singapore National Eye Centre, says: "In Singapore, our ageing population is also a problem, because the commonness indication for a cornea transplant is the natural ageing of the cornea, so it is quite urgent, we also have young people who have eye infections from contact lenses, and if we need a cornea, we need it urgently, so it is very timely."
The target within the next five years is to achieve a 100 per cent local donation rate. That's when every Singaporean who's blind from cornea disease, can receive a cornea from another Singaporean. To achieve this, the Singapore Eye Bank has expanded its infrastructure and manpower.
A centre of excellence for cornea, eye-banking and eye diseases have also been set up to develop training, and research in eye-banking and corneal diseases.
Professor Tan says: "In the past, we have had to resort to corneas, that we flown in for emergencies, and we have been among grateful to these international eye banks, but I think we need to rely on ourselves.
"We have the potential here in Singapore to get enough tissue, three in four Singaporean families we approach for eye donations say yes, and so we do have a caring population, it's a matter of logistics, we need more counselors, more donations counselors and technicians and with this increase workload,
"We work with several hospitals the SGH, the TTSH, and now the Changi General Hospital to mount hospital eye donations programmes and with that, we will get more donors, which will help more patients. if we are able to get more corneas, there are definitely economies in scale, and therefore we do hope to reduce the cost to our patients as well."
The price of transplant from a US donor can start from $7,000.
Professor Tan says about 12 million people around the world are blind from cornea disease - most of them are from Asia.
So efforts will not be limited to Singapore.
An Association of Eye Banks of Asia (AEBA) based in Singapore has been set up.
It aims to form a supranational network cooperative of Asian eye banks, coordinated in Singapore, to enhance corneal donation and establish shared corneal tissue programmes between Asian countries.
The Singapore Eye Bank will also be developing a new national eye bank within Colombo eye hospital in Sri Lanka to boost cornea donation rates further.
Sri Lankan was chosen as the country used to be the major provider of corneas throughout Asia.
Prof Tan says: "The eye bank in Sri Lanka have been for many years, helping to get corneas, and we are going to work in partner with them, to ramp up, to bring up the quality standards, up to the levels where in fact, now we can get a lot of corneas from Sri Lanka to help a lot of other people around the world, especially in asia, who really need the corneas."
The initiatives to alleviate corneal blindness in Asia and in Singapore are funded by a grant from the Lee Foundation and Temasek Foundation. - CNA/jy
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