Durban - Nearly 35 000 people in KwaZulu-Natal, including 1 270 children, are blind despite having treatable cataracts.
That’s according to a researcher who hopes that findings made in a recent study examining the obstacles facing children in the province with blindness will go a long way to changing attitudes and policies.
Dr Susan Levine, a senior lecturer in the School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Cape Town, has identified poverty, transport difficulties and deep-rooted cultural practices as among the reasons treatable eye condition did not receive attention.
Levine told the Daily News she had been recruited by paediatric eye care NGO Orbis Africa for a study funded by a $50 000 (R563 000) grant provided by the Paediatric Cataract Initiative (PCI), a partnership effort of Bausch and Lomb and the Lions Clubs International Foundation.
“There seemed to be a lack of attention given to child eye care in the province’s healthcare system, looking specifically at cataracts and blindness in children.
“This was the prompt (for the research),” she said.
The research paper, titled The Miracle Workers: obstacles and opportunities for restoring sight to children in KwaZulu-Natal, which will be published in the next edition of the Journal of Anthropology Southern Africa, was conducted at the Inkosi Albert Luthuli Hospital in KZN, and partly at a hospital in Zambia.
Lene Overland, chief executive of the NGO, explained that they had elected to partner the Department of Health in KZN in 2010 as the need for improved eye health at the time had been greatest in the province, and had also been a national priority.
“The province hosts more than 20 percent of the country’s population, and 23 percent of all children (more than 4.2 million) in South Africa live in KZN. The people of KZN bear a high burden of poverty.
“High poverty and low levels of infrastructure have a significant impact on children in the province. Children, especially in rural areas, have significant risk of childhood blindness,” Overland said.
She added that issues such as transport in KZN played a role in reaching available facilities. This was also highlighted in the study.
“Approximately 500 000 people of all ages in KZN are visually impaired, and the prevalence of childhood blindness in KZN is 0.55 per one million population (amounting to about 21 812 children). About 2.74 percent of children in KZN experience visual impairment caused by refractive error.
“A total of 34 915 people in KZN are blind due to treatable cataracts, 1 270 of them children. The province would benefit significantly from collaborative interventions to improve the eye health system.”
Levine, in her research paper, added: “There are approximately 383 920 known blind people in the country, with a ratio of six ophthalmologists per million people.
“Although eye disease is considered a ‘low-impact’ affliction in South Africa, for the afflicted who cannot see it is a significant gateway to the world, closed.”
She employed “illness narratives” to get to the bottom of why people either delayed treatment or avoided it as far as possible.
“I tread lightly on the thorny issue of culture in medical anthropology by placing greater emphasis on the political economy of health care, but not so lightly that I erase the presence of the ancestors, the weight of generational hierarchy and power, and the structural forces of history that sustain uneven access to medical care.”
For example, as she explained in her paper, treatment was sometimes delayed because the decision to seek help was often a family one.
Also, in some cases, the affliction, if hereditary, was treated as something that “needed to be endured” and lived with, having been passed down through the generations and, thus, linked to the ancestors.
She also identified gaps in knowledge in identifying eye problems. “All of the (50) children in this study had been immunised at clinics as babies, and all the children’s eye problems were congenital in nature and not due to an injury or other developmental causes.
“This means that if the immunisation nurse had been trained to recognise the early visible signs of cataract… then post-immunisation delays would have been dramatically reduced.”
Daily News