To second-year Feinberg School of Medicine student Prajwal Ciryam, cataracts are “an easy problem.”
“We know how to solve them … there’s pretty much an unequivocal cure,” said Ciryam, Weinberg ’06 and a former Daily columnist. “It’s not a huge, oh-my-God quadruple bypass surgery.”
Two doctors from India and Ghana flew to Chicago last week to help Ciryam and his start-up group, CatarACT International, raise awareness for an efficient model to treat the seemingly simple eye affliction.
“We share a common vision,” said Michael Gyasi, the doctor from Ghana. “We’re trying to work together and become self-sustaining so that we don’t continually depend on the United States getting resources to us.”
Gyasi and Indian doctor V.P. Selvam are partners in CatarACT International’s effort to build a network of cataract hospitals offering free surgeries. As part of the group’s Healthcare Pioneers Week in Chicago, the doctors also spoke to about 25 people on the Evanston campus April 17.
CatarACT International is dedicated to providing funding and training for local doctors to start health care programs abroad that will not require foreign aid and resources beyond set-up costs, said Ciryam, who founded the group in 2007 and acts as executive director. The first project is an eye hospital in Bawku, Ghana, which will be led by Gyasi and is slated to come together in about a year.
“If this works, what we’re trying to do here is really change the course of health care in these countries,” Ciryam said. “When we start getting on the ground more, once it gets implemented, we’ll be able to see the impact on people’s lives.”
The group’s approach draws upon members’ expertise in different fields, not just medicine, Ciryam said. It incorporates ideas from areas such as economics, international relations, history and anthropology.
“We’re not trying to figure out how medicine works,” said Weinberg senior Nick Naroditski, the organization’s director of global partnerships. “We’re trying to figure out how people work and fix it.”
Ciryam was inspired by Arasan Eye Hospital, Selvam’s facility in India, which offers free cataract surgeries to 60 percent of its patients, Selvam said. Using revenue from patients who can afford treatment, six ophthalmologists perform about 10,000 free surgeries each year.
Cataracts blind about 20 million people around the world, a number that is expected to double in the next 10 years, Ciryam said.
As cataracts form, the normally transparent lens of the eye turns white and opaque, resulting in vision loss and eventually blindness, Selvam said. Though the cause of cataracts is still unknown, many scientists believe the eye condition is linked to aging and exposure to ultraviolet rays, he said.
The surgeries to treat cataracts in developing countries cost an estimated $15 apiece and take about five minutes to perform, Ciryam said.
Doctors make a small incision in the eye, remove the lens and replace it with a plastic version, which will restore vision in about 98 percent of patients, Selvam said.
“One advantage about ophthalmology is it is standardized,” Selvam said. “So if you have a cataract, you remove it. But with general surgery, each case is different.”
CatarACT International aims to develop a network of hospitals throughout West Africa similar to a non-governmental organization, Ciryam said.
Estimates for the cost of one hospital’s set-up run about $100,000, which will come from grants and private donations, said Amar Vira, Weinberg ’07 and the group’s director of research and education. Training one doctor in India for eight weeks will cost about $4,000, the first-year Feinberg medical student said.
Right now CatarACT International is still a small organization of undergraduate and graduate students, mostly from Northwestern, but Ciryam said he hopes the group will grow as its projects expand globally.
“Big problems globally in health care aren’t going to be solved just by doctors or medical students or economists or diplomats,” he said. “It’s really going to be about bringing people together from very different backgrounds to find a solution.”
