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Flying Eye Doctors Head for Northwest China's Xinjiang
Doctors from the world's only flying eye hospital, Orbis, left here Saturday for Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region Saturday after a three- week program to treat local eye patients in Hainan Province, south China.
During their stay in Haikou, the provincial capital, Orbis flying doctors carried out operations on 53 eye disease patients free of charge in the airborne hospital. They also treated another 16 eye patients at the Hainan Provincial People's Hospital.
These lucky patients were chosen from 209 eye patients, two to 81 years in age, and most of them were from poverty-stricken rural and mountainous areas.
The Obis medical workers and air crew, most of them are volunteers receiving no pay for their work, also donated 11 corneas, which were transplanted into the eyes of patients from the province.
Zheng Wanchuan, head of the Hainan hospital, said most of the patients who had operations have been discharged from hospital and report good surgery results and satisfaction with the operations.
Doctors, nurses, bio-medical specialists from 13 countries including Canada, the United States, Germany, Italy and Argentina participated in the three-week-long charity program in Hainan, while more than 70 medical workers from local hospitals watched the operations and received further professional training.
Orbis, with headquarters in New York, is a non-profit, humanitarian organization dedicated to fighting avoidable blindness worldwide. Millions of eye patients in more than 80 countries have benefited from Orbis, since the flying eye hospital was opened in 1982.
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