Editorial (Wednesday, 6th September 2022)
The Cape Coast Teaching Hospital (CCTH) has successfully performed its first set of corneal transplants to restore the sights of some eight patients on the verge of blindness.
The surgeries were conducted in two days at no cost to the patients under a partnership between the hospital and Himalayan Cataract Project (Cure Blindness), a US-based foundation working to cure blindness across the world.
A corneal transplant is an operation to remove all or part of a damaged cornea (tissues from the eye) and replace it with healthy new tissues from a donor (a recently dead patient).
The procedure is used to cure conditions such as corneal ulcer, corneal dystrophy (inherited eye diseases), Keratoconus (thinning disorder in the cornea) and complications from cataract surgeries.
Three doctors from the United States of America (USA) and three cornea surgeons from the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital (KBTH) in Accra and the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH) in Kumasi trained by the Foundation took between 60 to 90 minutes to operate on each patient.
The Daily Searchlight is grateful to the Himalayan Cataract Project for the effort to transfer the knowledge to Ghanaian medical doctors.
We believe that such bilateral transfer of knowledge should continue to take place in many or all sectors for Ghana as a developing nation.
We also believe that the doctors who received this knowledge so freely and bountifully would go on to share the knowledge and experience gained with other trained professionals down the line, so that the true purpose of the Himalayan Cataract Project would be met.
(This article was first published in the column EDITORIAL of the Daily Searchlight of Wednesday, 6th September, 2022. The Daily Searchlight appears on the newsstands of Ghana every working day and PDF versions are available for sale online twenty-four hours a day all day throughout the world on www.ghananewsstand.com).
