Flight for sight

Emma White visits the Orbis Flying Eye Hospital when it touched down at London Stansted as part of the Vision 2005 conference earlier this month

Every five seconds someone somewhere in the world goes blind, yet 75 per cent of  cases are preventable and easily treatable. Ninety per cent of the 37 million blind in the world live in developing countries.

Inspired by the scale of the problem, Houston ophthalmologist Dr David Paton founded Orbis in 1982. He came up with the idea of putting an eye hospital on board a plane to provide care anywhere in the world and thus the Flying Eye Hospital was born.

In its 23 years the Flying Eye Hospital has conducted over 230 programmes in 67 countries and its medical volunteers have treated thousands of patients while training some 63,000 medical professionals. Already, Orbis is estimated to have restored sight to 17.5 million people, but its work is far from done. Without immediate increased efforts, the number of people who become needlessly blind could double by the year 2020.