Singapore, a major aviation hub in Southeast Asia and one of the most attractive medical tourism country is playing a significant role in tissue banking in the region as well.

Medical tourists looking for a cornea transplant can look forward to an increased supply in Singapore if there is shortfall in supply in their own countries.

Singapore Eye Bank (SEB), a centre of excellence in cornea, eye banking and eye diseases performs a huge number of transplant round the year. It deals with the most sophisticated types of grafts.

In earlier days, if someone needed a cornea, s/he had to replace the whole cornea. Now technology has developed which permits replacing the damaged portion of the cornea only, which is in fact a great milestone in eye care.

The SEB is also exploring the use of keyhole corneal transplant surgery to pre-cut donor tissue in Singapore before having it couriered to meet the needs of

patients all over Asia. Endothelial Keratoplasty, as the procedure is known, will help reduce the length of treatment from six months to two to three weeks. There is also less risk of rejection and fewer side effects.

There is a severe lack of donor corneal tissue across Asia with waiting lists numbering up to the thousands in countries such as Thailand. Every year, a

large number of cornea transplant operations are performed in Singapore, half of them for foreign patients.

Singaporeans are usually allocated corneas from Singaporeans, or they can source for them from the United States or the Philippines. Bur foreigners who come to Singapore for operations usually import them from mainly the US and the Philippines.

The corneas used in Singapore are not kept for more than seven days after they are harvested, to ensure they stay fresh. But corneas from the US take five to seven days to arrive in Asia. To overcome the problem, SEB has teamed up with Sri Lankan health authorities and set up an eye bank to procure cornea donations from that country.

This is done in partnership with the National Eye Hospital of Colombo and the Sri Lankan Ministry of Health. Sri Lanka has been a major provider of corneas since the 1960s, with its primarily Buddhist population regarding cornea donation as a meritorious act.

The SEB aims to restore Sri Lanka as a major provider of corneas to Asian countries and attain international accreditation by Association of Eye Banks of Asia (AEBA) standards.

Other countries can also start similar partnership programme for their own countries which could serve more people requiring the cornea transplant.

E-mail: tareq.salahuddin@thedailystar.net