July has been a relatively quiet month for me, although the irony has been that the heat and humidity of my small, un-airconditioned hotel room in Geneva (for a WHO meeting about the strategy of Vision 2020 for the next 5 years) was far in excess of anything I have experienced in Africa!

The Geneva meeting brought together many eyecare agencies and ophthalmological societies with WHO. One of the great things about this sector is that the NGOs collaborate with one another to try to ensure that we work more effectively against the common enemy of avoidable blindness, rather than competing to say ‘I did more cataract operations than you’. It is a refreshing change from the commercial environment I worked in before Sightsavers.

A number of important themes came out, particularly around our priorities for which diseases to concentrate on. Our fight against trachoma and river blindness is really bearing fruit, with the numbers of people suffering from these diseases (mainly in Africa) on the decrease. Obviously we need to continue our work to ensure this trend isn’t reversed, but it also means that other causes such as diabetic retinopathy and glaucoma are now much more significant from a percentage point of view. The whole eyecare community has been taken by surprise to see how diabetic retinopathy is increasing significantly even in developing countries – notably in Asia, as it had been perceived wisdom that diabetes was only a real problem for those living Western lifestyles.

We therefore agreed that we must put more resources into these diseases, even though they are more difficult to treat in the field.

Another key theme was that refractive error (simple short or long sight) actually affected a huge number of people. Lack of access to glasses means that many people in developing countries are effectively blind just for want of spectacles. WHO should soon be releasing some research showing just how many people are in this position, but early indications are that the numbers are shocking.

At Sightsavers we intend to scale up our work in this area. We do not send second hand glasses overseas – this really doesn’t make sense as it costs less to import new ones in bulk from places like India and China, and these are usually much better. By the time you have cleaned and sorted old spectacles, the cost is uneconomic in comparison. We are looking at how we can get appropriate glasses to people, particularly children of 11 – 15, being the age when refractive error usually develops in earnest and starts to have an impact. Of course this is when it can then hamper their education and which can have lifelong implications.

In July we have also welcomed two new trustees to Sightsavers – David Sands Smith, who has many years of experience working for DFID overseas, and John Lafferty, an extremely impressive Glaswegian judge, who has been completely blind since his twenties.

Next month I shall be travelling to Uganda, where I will be visiting schools and eye hospitals and getting an understanding of the challenges we face there.