In two days my grandmother will celebrate her 98th birthday. But she will hardly be able to see it because she has macular degeneration in both eyes.
This is more than an inconvenience. Without her central vision her sense of balance is gone. Being close to a century old, her bones are fragile. Any fall is a likely trip to the ER. And lately, she falls a lot.
So, in today's news I read two promising stories about restoring sight.
Scientists at the University of Washington in Seattle - a publicly funded institution - have developed a gene Therapy For Colorblindness which could in time...
...potentially....be used to treat other eye conditions involving damage to the cones in the retina, such as achromatopsia, which causes nearly complete colorblindness and extremely poor central vision, as well as age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy.
Okay, that's not gonna help Grandmother a lot. But the later news story offers another hope of sight
A 60-year-old US grandmother, blind for nearly a decade, has recovered her sight after surgeons implanted a tooth in her eye as a base to hold a tiny plastic lens, her doctors said Wednesday.
By the way the procedure was developed in Italy in the 1960s
The procedure was originally developed in 1963 by Italian ophthalmologist Dr. Benedetto Strampelli. It was not very successful initially, however, because of serious complications--such as the tooth falling out of the eye. Modifications by Dr. Giancarlo Falcinelli of Italy solved those problems,however, and the procedure is now used in Europe and Japan--albeit rarely. Perez traveled to Rome to learn the technique from Falcinelli.
13 years ago, this procedure had been done 180 times in Italy.
In case you are curious Italy ranks #2 consistently for health care. Not bad for a socialist country.
Innovation doesn't seem to suffer either.
BTW that as the first such procedure ever done in the United States. That's what being #37 gets you.
Oh - and all private sectorized and entrepreneurial. Yeah, right.