Your Vision is restoring sight and transforming lives
Blindness does not wait. Neither do we.
You are helping provide urgent sight-restoring surgery every month. And we can't thank you enough.
Eye diseases like cataract and trachoma can lead to blindness when, in fact, they're either preventable or treatable. At least 9 out of 10 people who are blind or vision impaired don’t need to be.
Visionaries like you are providing treatment to transform the lives of those most vulnerable. People like Grace and Nicholas.
Cataract
Your vision is helping millions impacted
Cataract is the world’s leading cause of avoidable blindness. Fred brought modern cataract surgery to developing countries, making it more accessible to those who urgently need it.
Caused by a clouding of the lens of the eye, cataract can be treated with a routine, 20 minute operation – yet this is something millions of people are still unable to access. They are people like Nicholas and Grace from Kenya.
Grace was hit in the eye by a rock many years ago, and the trauma caused a blinding cataract in that eye. It left her struggling to provide for her three children. But the hardest part of her life was knowing that her 7-year-old son Nicholas was blind too.
Grace and Nicholas live in a remote region in Kenya – a country where avoidable blindness affects more than 328,000 people.
Luckily for Grace she received a visit from a community eye health worker trained thanks to the support of Visionaries like you.
The health worker told Grace that The Fred Hollows Foundation would pay for her and Nicholas to travel the long distance to the hospital and receive the treatment they so urgently needed. Grace was elated.
Thanks to Visionaries like you, Grace and Nicholas were able to access to life changing surgery before it was too late.
You may not be performing the operations but you are restoring sight and transforming the lives of people like Grace and Nicholas every month. We can't thank you enough.
Trachoma
Your vision is putting an end to blinding trachoma
Trachoma is the world’s leading infectious cause of blindness. More than 1.9 million people are blind or vision impaired because of trachoma.
This highly infectious disease turns the eyelids inwards, causing the lashes to painfully scratch the eye with every blink. Without treatment, people suffering from trachoma are at risk of permanent blindness.
Thanks to the support of Visionaries like you, The Fred Hollows Foundation is working hard eliminate avoidable blindness caused by trachoma, by implementing the ‘SAFE’ strategy (Surgery, Antibiotics, Facial cleanliness, Environmental improvement).
- Surgery: using remote surgical teams to prevent blindness for more people in rural communities
- Antibiotics: distributing antibiotics to whole communities to treat active infections
- Face washing: educating people on the importance of hygiene to stop the infection spreading
- Environment: giving communities access to clean water and sanitation
Visionaries like you are ensuring more people like Hawaiti (pictured below) don’t lose their sight to this excruciatingly painful eye disease. Thank you.
