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KAKS eye screening started in Nepal

April 21, 2022: after years of preparation, the Community Children Eye Screening pilot project is launched in Nepal.
At Itahari Hospital in Province 1 in eastern Nepal, the first 110 children’s eyes were examined by vaccination workers on April 21.
The vaccination workers examine the children for strabismus, ptosis, leukocoria and nystagmus.
They have previously been trained by ophthalmologists.
The aim is to detect mild and severe eye diseases in children that can lead to blindness and death.
Visually impaired people in Nepal are largely excluded from society and have little chance of leading a normal life.
Our motivation was and is to change this and save the lives of children.
Children who develop retinoblastoma in Nepal currently have a survival rate of less than 50%.

The idea: the vaccination rate for children in Nepal is 95%. By linking eye screening to the existing vaccination programs, it is possible to diagnose and treat the vast majority of children with eye diseases at an early stage. The motivation of the vaccination workers is huge: they are almost exclusively women who have children or grandchildren themselves, who see the training as a great opportunity to save a child’s life and who see the additional task as a chance to gain greater knowledge and prestige in their village with their training as eye experts.
The Community Children Eye Program is starting in Province 1, but the long-term plan is to expand the program to the whole of Nepal and hand it over to the government. Such a program can only be implemented with strong and absolutely trustworthy cooperation partners: the physician Dr. Ben Limbu from Global Eye Hospital has developed this program in close cooperation with KAKS and will transfer the eye screening to the whole of Nepal into a government program after the successful completion of the pilot project. Almost 200,000 children are born in Nepal every year. The screening – linked to the existing vaccination programs – will reach the majority of them. Even in the remotest corners of this vast and mountainous country.

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