Daily Times

KARACHI: Despite the low cornea donation, a large number of pledged corneas could not be transplanted in recent years, Daily Times learnt.

For example around 40,000 cards were filled at Pakistan Eye Bank Society Hospital (PEBS) Karachi, during the last thirty years. But majority of them could not be materialized.

“This is because of lack of awareness. In most cases relatives do not even know about it ,” said Dr Qazi Wasiq, the medical director of Pakistan Eye Bank Society Hospital.

According to Dr Wasiq, donor eyes must be removed within six hours after death.

The cornea is the eye’s outermost layer, the clear, dome-shaped surface that covers the front of the eye. When the cornea becomes cloudy or scarred, light cannot penetrate the eye to reach the light-sensitive retina. Poor vision or blindness may result.

A corneal transplant is the surgical procedure, which replaces a disc-shaped segment of a defective cornea with a similarly shaped piece of a healthy donor cornea. The new cornea is placed into the area where the damaged tissue was removed and then stitched into place.

The eye bank does keep a “bank” of tissue in its laboratory. Fortunately, cornea tissue can be stored for up to 14 days before it must be used for transplant. However, since the demand for ocular tissue is so great most donor tissue is distributed within three or four days after its arrival.

“There were religious myths and misconceptions which were warded of with the help of religious scholars. But even then corneal donation at local level is not affective,” Dr Wasiq added.

He said that another reason behind lack of donation is lack of infrastructure. We are working on it with Amercian Eye Banking Society in this connection and efforts are being made to establish corneal lab and corneal facility of eye banking which would be available soon.

At present there more than 200, 000 cornea blind patients in Pakistan and because of lack of local donation, we dependant on foreign donations that is mainly filled through Sri Lanka. So far Sri Lanka Eye Bank has send around 16,000 corneas to Pakistan.

Published in Daily Times, July 27^th 2017.