VIP Laser Center

January 19, 2006

A WORLD VISION

DAVIDROGERS, Daily News Staff Writer

U2's soaring anthem Beautiful Day anchors a mission video shown aboard Orbis International's DC-10 Flying Eye Hospital.

At the heart of the huge plane, parked through Saturday at the Palm Beach International Airport, is a surgical suite where thousands of poor people from across the globe have had their vision restored.

Ophthalmologist Dr. Cliff Salinger, a cornea specialist, has helped bring the beauty of sight to many in the past 10 years. His volunteer work on the Orbis jet has taken him for a few weeks at a time to four regions of China, as well as Paraguay and Cuba.

In mid-1988, just after completing his residency at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Salinger started a yearlong stint aboard the Flying Eye Hospital.

Last November, Salinger, who operates a practice in Palm Beach Gardens, flew with Orbis to Chittagong, Bangladesh where, for two weeks, he performed corneal transplants, sometime combined with cataract extraction or other intraocular procedures. And more importantly, he showed local doctors how to perform the sight-saving procedures themselves.

At the end of the trip Salinger met with the president of Bangladesh, Iajuddin Ahmed, in the capital city of Dhaka to push for greater awareness of ways to prevent and treat blindness, and to increase donations of corneas. In that county, the need for donated organs far outstrips the supply, he said.

New York-based Orbis International estimates that, since its founding in 1982, its Flying Eye Hospital and community outreach programs have - by training local doctors who in turn train others - helped restored the sight of millions of people. In the past 10 years, Salinger has participated in eight Orbis missions.

The ophthalmologist brought six corneas, provided by an eye bank office in Tampa, to Bangladesh for transplant surgery. He performed three of the surgeries and supervised local doctors as they performed the other three.

The plane's audio-visual equipment allows other doctors and nurses in the observation room to watch the surgeries and ask questions during the procedures.

"The first one we did on the plane was a little 8-year old girl [who was] blind in both eyes, totally scarred over by a viral condition when she was 4 years old," Salinger said. "We did the corneal transplant. The next day, we go to the hospital and take off the patch. She can see her father's face for the first time in four years, look around the room [and] see the people in the room, count fingers from five, seven feet away."

Moments like that make the volunteer work worth Salinger's time.

"It truly sends chills up my spine to know that I have been able to participate in something as meaningful as that," he said.

Orbis uses local contacts in countries to pre-screen candidates, said Drew Boshell, director of the Flying Eye Hospital. The patients are picked based on economic need and a determination that their treatment is not likely to have complications.

The selection process also takes into account what skills or procedures local physicians want to learn, Boshell said.

The Flying Eye Hospital has a full-time staff of 23 people - six nurses, five opthamologists, two plane engineers and assorted support personnel.

But the Orbis mission is much broader than the Flying Eye Hospital. The organization has permanent offices in China, Ethiopia, India, Bangladesh and Vietnam as part of its long-term, strategy to help alleviate blindness there, Boshell said. Other Orbis projects include hospital-based programs and a Web-based physician consulting service.

More than 100 times a year, Orbis sends doctors to hospitals in less-developed regions to give one-on-one subspecialty training to health care professionals, Boshell said.

Orbis fellowship programs allow physicians serving these areas to study in the United States and elsewhere, he said.

"We also have a cyber site, the only one in the world where eye-care professionals around the world can do e-consultations over the Internet using video and feeds to discuss case management," he said.

The group brought the Flying Eye Hospital to West Palm Beach to increase awareness of preventable blindness and show supporters the plane prior to the Orbis Global Ball on Saturday, which will take place in a tented area at Signature Flight Support, on the southside of PBIA.

The organization's goal to eliminate unnecessary blindness worldwide.

"It's a huge issue," said Boshell. "The World Health Organization estimates there is approximately 37 million people in the world who are blind, and approximately 75 percent of these blind people, if they had access to adequate eye-care services, their eye sight could be restored or improved significantly. So that works out to about 24 million people who are unnecessarily and completely blind today."

-drogers@pbdailynews.com