Andhra Pradesh - Hyderabad

Changes in law sought to promote cornea collection

HYDERABAD: With the collection of only 30,000 corneas last year, as against the annual requirement of one lakh, president of the Eye Bank Association of India (EBAI) M. Srinivasan has urged the Centre to modify the Human Organ Transplant Act to facilitate trained technicians retrieve eyes, on the lines of the practice in the West.

As per the Act, only registered medical practitioners can retrieve eyes. An amendment allowing certified technicians to do the job will help in stepping up the collection. At many places doctors might not be able to spare their time in the immediate neighbourhood or villages following the death of a person.

A factor hampering collection of corneas is the delay caused by medico-legal cases. Of the collected 30,000 corneas, only 13,000 were grafted. The rest were either of poor quality or affected by diseases.

Pointing out that corneas need to be retrieved within six hours of a person’s death, Dr. Srinivasan told The Hindu that in accident cases, the process gets delayed due to inquest and filing of the First Information Report.

In developed countries, a doctor, with the consent of relatives, could recommend to the eye bank to retrieve corneas.

Observing that eyeballs were not used for post-mortem analysis, he said police or the doctor conducting the post-mortem could be made to approve their removal within six hours.

He said while there were 500 eye banks in the country, only 10 of them were harvesting 80 per cent of donor eyes. South India was doing very well and two-thirds of 30,000 were donated from the region. The performance was very poor in Orissa, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in spite of government support.

Dr. Srinivasan, who is director, Aravinda Eye Hospitals, Madurai, said EBAI had formulated certain standards for setting up eye banks and requested the Centre to authorise it for accrediting them.

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