The day before we recorded this episode, our guest Geoff Tabin, returned to the US from Ethiopia after a two week -surgical outreach where he and his team completed over a 1000 sight-restoring surgeries. He’s the co-founder of Cure Blindness. Their vision is a world where no person is needlessly blind. Tabin has been at this for over 3-decades. It all began with a climbing expedition to the Himalayas in the 80’s. The conversation today veers from stories on the front lines of health care in the worlds poorest countries, ideas around the moral imperative behind health care delivery, challenges of doing something so bold in the face of naysayers, and how he found himself behind bars in an Indonesian jail on what should have been his first day of medical school. Enjoy.
Imagine life if you were unable to see. Could you find the toilet, or leave in an emergency? Now imagine you lived in a place where there are no paved roads, no clean water. In our world, 14 million people, more than the entire population of Canada, are blind, unable to perform the daily tasks of living. Ninety percent of the world's visually impaired live in low-income settings. Eighty-five percent of the blindness on our planet could be cured, or could have been prevented. 20 million people are needlessly blind from treatable cataracts.
Now imagine: There exists a surgery that can restore perfect sight to these people in five minutes, for the cost of $25 per surgery. Imagine: We can overcome all the needless blindness in the world. People say it's impossible.
Some of Dr. Tabin’s Highlights:
LINKS
Cure Blindness & Himalayan Cataract Project Website