Professor brings sight to people around the world

If you’ve met Suresh Chandra, you’ve likely been enlisted in his crusade to end blindness

He’s the reason that more than 100 people got out of bed on a rainy Sept. 13 to walk across campus, raising money so more of the world’s poor people can have sight-restoring cataract surgery. Even in a downpour, his pitch is hard to resist.

“For $20 or $30, what you might spend on dinner, you can give someone the gift of sight,’’ Chandra says. “For these people, it is a life-changing event.”

Chandra, an ophthalmology professor in the School of Medicine and Public Health, has helped bring the gift of sight to more than 120,000 people through the Combat Blindness Foundation (CBF). But the way he looks at it, he’s barely gotten started.

There are about 37 million blind people in the world, most of them in developing countries where ophthalmologists are few.

“The good news is that in about 80 percent of the cases, you can perform surgery to reverse the blindness or prevent it in the first place,’’ Chandra says.

His group hopes that by partnering with Indian and African doctors and with world health organizations, CBF can help perform one million cataract surgeries in the next 10 years.

It’s a lofty goal, but the group has achieved much already.

Chandra’s foundation helped establish Aurolab, a factory in India that makes intraocular lenses. A surgical procedure replaces natural lenses, which become clouded by cataracts with the intraocular lens. Aurolab reduced the cost of the lens down from $120 (for U.S.-made lenses) to about $2. With volunteer medical staff, it brings the cost of sight-restoring cataract surgery in India and Africa to slightly more than $20 per patient.

The other major cause of blindness in the developing world is a vitamin A deficiency. Combat Blindness Foundation has started a program in the Indian state of Gujarat to screen children for malnutrition and treat them with vitamin A to prevent blindness. In 2007, Combat Blindness Foundation screened 8,000 children under the age of 6 and treated those who needed vitamins.

Chandra and his wife, Sunita, a recently retired UW Health pathologist, grew up in northern India and earned their medical degrees there. They came to the United States so Suresh could do a retinal fellowship at Harvard Medical School. They came to Madison in 1974, and haven’t left.

“By 1982 or so, my practice was established and I felt the need to do something to give back,’’ he says.

Chandra started by going to India to train doctors and perform complex retinal surgeries. But he had an epiphany. In the four hours it took him to do a single retinal surgery, local doctors had restored sight to about 40 people through cataract surgery. He decided he could affect many more people by attacking the most common causes of blindness.

Today the Combat Blindness Foundation has ongoing projects in more than 10 locations in India, Africa and the Philippines. Over the years, he’s taken doctors, lawyers and television journalists to India to see the problem firsthand. They come back as true believers.

“It’s really a life-changing experience, and everyone who goes there says that,’’ says Gordon Derzon, former head of UW Hospital and Clinics and now vice chair of the charity. Derzon went to India this year to assess health care needs and support the work of local doctors at the Tarabai Desai Eye Hospital in Jodhpur, India.

“The physicians there are really devoted to what they’re doing,’’ he says. “Two ophthalmologists might screen 150 patients in the morning, then come back and do 24 surgeries that night. And they do it two or three times a week. It’s remarkable.”

Stephen Sauer, a cataract surgeon and Chandra’s colleague in the ophthalmology department, had a similar experience at Shroff’s Charity Eye Hospital in Delhi, where he went in 2007 to teach and perform surgery.

“I was humbled at how so much could be done with so little,’’ he says, “and quickly realized just how much I would be the student in many ways on this journey.”

Chandra, Sauer and other faculty and staff of the ophthalmology department contribute here by offering a free eye care clinic for the uninsured on World Sight Day in October, sponsored by Combat Blindness Foundation. Styleyes Optical at UW Health donates eye glasses, and UW Hospital and Clinics provides free surgery for those who qualify.

The rest of the year, Combat Blindness Foundation helps support special services and medications for patients at the monthly Free Community Eye Care Clinic at UW Health.

Chandra can tell the stories of so many people whose lives were touched by the charity. He remembers one Kenyan grandmother who was blinded by cataracts and seemed very depressed.

“The next day, we removed her bandages and she started smiling,’’ he says. “I don’t speak Swahili and she doesn’t speak English, but that smile told me she was so happy.”

For more information, visit the Combat Blindness Foundation.