Bangalore students to help identify blindness

A group of Bangalore doctors is geared up for two new missions to search and destroy blindness and eye tumours in children. The missions - find-the-blind and child-to-child - were launched at the Narayana Nethralaya on Thursday.

Under the find-the-blind programme, health workers in rural areas will be trained in clicking photographs of the child’s eye, through a digital camera provided to them and identify the tumour, if any. “As part of our pilot project, we are training anganwadi nurses. It has been an adventure to teach them how to use a digital camera,” said Dr Ashwin Mallipatna, in-charge of retinoblastoma services, department of paediatric ophthalmology, Narayana Nethralaya.

He said that the pilot project had over 120 children successfully undergoing the method which will now be executed in rural areas. “As of now, we are looking at spreading this in districts surrounding Bangalore city. However, we want to take it across the country,” he said.

The speciality of the programme is that in case a child is found to suffer from this problem, the residence of the child would be tagged using GPS technology, which helps the team to follow it up easily. “What we have done is that by using Google Earth and GPS technology on cell phones, we mark a child who is diagnosed with the problem. This will help us access him/her again for an easy follow-up easy,” he said.

In the child-to-child programme, students will play a vital role in identifying those who have the defect. “Collecting information from health workers alone will not provide enough data. Thus, we decided to teach students about this technique in various localities. They will be taught what to look for in the photograph, and whom to contact if they find the symptoms. The children will tell their parents about this, which will help develop the chain,” Mallipatna said.