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Award of Excellence
Ami Vitale Freelance
"Tibet - Seeing Again"
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Zhao Ying Xiu hands out patients' identity cards as
they wait to get cataracts removed at an eye camp set up by the Nepali doctor
Ruit and his team in Xining, China. July 29, 2005.
The World Health Organization estimates that 45
million people worldwide are blind; 90 percent of them are in developing
nations. Nearly half could be helped by a procedure that's become routine in
many nations‰ cataract surgery. In Nepal, a tiny mountain kingdom, Dr. Sanduk
Ruit made a name for himself by pioneering modern microscopic cataract
surgery, including the utilization of intraocular lenses (implanted in the
eyeball). Dr. Ruit and his partner Dr. Geoffrey Tabin went to remote parts of
China this past summer to perform thousands of eye surgeries in the matter of
a few weeks and simultaneously taught local doctors how to perform the
surgeries more cheaply and efficiently. Together they transformed the lives
of these people who never would have had the opportunity to get the
surgeries. As they took the bandages off, many got a glimpse of their
children for the first time in years and some saw their grandchildren for the
first time ever.
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