Lake Zone Childhood Blindness Prventation Project:

Bugando Medical Centre in collaboration with ChristophellBlinden Mission soon will lounge a four years project for childhood blindness prevention within Lake Zone regions. The aim of the project is to build capacity of Bugando Medical Centre to become a reliable centre that offers a qualified eye services along the lake zones regions.

The project will involve the construction of the eye centre and equipment, outreaches within Mwanza and lake zones regions, training of health workers to improve early identification of children with vision problems.

In this collaboration BMC committedto offer land for construction of eye centre, also will start foundation of the building, whileCBM will contribute a total of 2.2 billion for construction,vehicle, equipment, and training. The building (Eye Centre) will contain adult outpatient department, pediatric clinic, eye wards and theatre. All eye services will be available at eye centre building. Therefore the completion of the project will allow eye department to have enough space for service.

Also by having new and Mordenequipment’s will improve the quality and wellbeing of patients. Preliminary steps have been taken place filming of the needs, planning of the activities and budgeting also organisation capacity assessment. There is no hospital that deliver Pediatric surgery in the lake zone regions. In a year 2018 Eye Department BMC in collaboration with the Eye Department KCMC we operated some 60 cases of childhood cataract for a catchment population of 16 million. It is estimated that the prevalence of childhood cataract in Tanzania is estimated at 9 per 100,000 people. Therefore, in a population of 16 million people there are roughly 1440 cases need surgery.

Childhood blindness refers to a group of diseases and conditions occurring in childhood or early adolescence, which, if left untreated, result in blindness or severe visual impairment that are likely to be untreatable later in lifeThe prevalence of childhood blindness varies widely between developed and developing countries by 0.3 per1000 children and 1.5 per 1000 children respectively.

It is estimated that the number of blind children worldwide is 1.4 million, third quarter of them lives in developing countries. Themajor causes of blindness in children are, cataract, rubella cataract, corneal scarring from measles, vitamin A deficiency, the use of harmful traditional eye remedies, ophthalmia neonatorum, retinopathy of prematurity congenital abnormalities, glaucoma, hereditary retinal dystrophies, optic nerve and higher visual pathways