Eye doctor fights blindness in developing world

In the United States, you can have cataracts removed from your eyes if they’re becoming inconvenient. If your night driving is starting to suffer or you can’t quite see where the golf ball landed, ophthalmologist Matt Oliva said, you’re a candidate for surgery.

But in the developing world, Oliva said, cataract blindness can be “a death sentence.” People who become blind often cannot cope with life. They may not be able to manage their own daily needs — let alone see the faces of their loved ones. They can suffer malnutrition. Malnutrition and a shortened lifespan are typical results, Oliva said.

Tonight, you can follow Oliva’s efforts to bring inexpensive, effective cataract surgery to rural Ethiopia on the HBO documentary series VICE. VICE’s segment on “Beating Blindness,” hosted by VICE correspondent Isobel Yeung, will air at 8 p.m.

“Miraculous” is what Oliva calls his experience in Nepal when he was a medical student in the late 1990s and got to watch cataract surgery take 10 or 15 minutes to cure people who’d been completely blind for 10 or 15 years, he said. That was what tilted him toward ophthalmology as a career, he said.

“The amazing thing is that, if you work as part of a local team, you can in a short amount of time dramatically change the lives of individuals and their families and whole communities,” he said. During the trip to rural Ethiopia that will be featured on VICE, he said, he and the local medical team restored sight to 750 people in five days.

Oliva, who grew up in Vancouver and is the son of noted local philanthropists Steve and Jan Oliva, eventually joined the board of directors of the Himalayan Cataract Project he’d been so inspired by. That name is a slight misnomer, as well as a measure of success, Oliva added: the project originally assumed it would always be working in Nepal and the Himalayas because of massive amounts of blindness there. “It would take a lifetime to wipe it out,” he said.

But now, he said, blindness in Nepal has plummeted and the project has spread to many other countries, including India, Ghana, Myanmar, Bhutan and Rwanda. The need remains acute, he added; it’s estimated that there are 19 million people in the world affected by cataract blindness.

At less than $100 per person, cataract surgery is considered one of the most effective public health interventions in the world by the World Health Organization, Oliva said. The real key to success, he said, is training local doctors and nurses to perform the surgery — so the knowledge stays put and keeps working after the visiting team goes home.

Home for Oliva is Medford, Ore., where he works at a medical eye center. More information about him and his work — including a video of him accepting a humanitarian award from his alma mater, the University of Washington — is available at http://www.medicaleyecenter.com/our-providers/matt-oliva-md/.