END OF BLINDESS

SOURCE : CNN

Legendary opthalmist Dr. Josef Bille who was recently awarded EPO lifetime achievement for his invention of eye surgery using laser- at his University of Heidelberg laboratory …. could possibly open the door that ends blindness .

He said

“There shouldn’t be any blind person ten years from now in the world,” says Dr. Josef Bille

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Key to his ambition are femtosecond lasers; ultra-short and focused beams of light that efficiently target the bumps and film of a cataract without any cutting that can cause collateral damage or complications in the healing process.

The lasers are precise enough to pinpoint individual molecules and subtly adjust their focus while leaving healthy material alone. Numerous tests have proved they offer significant safety advantages over existing best practice.

Dr. Josef Bille, pioneer of laser eye surgery in the 1980s, and femtosecond systems today.

“It’s a treatment which can make every eye perfect,” says Bille. “We call it perfect vision, it is twice as good as normal vision, so you see twice as fine detail at much better contrast… Five times better contrast vision at dim lighting conditions, rain or in foggy areas.”

Bille’s target of 10 years to eliminate blindness may prove optimistic, with far more basic methods such as early screening used to tackle impairment in many of the worst affected parts of the world.

But since he was told that laser surgery would not work almost thirty years and hundreds of millions of operations ago, the world’s leading ophthalmist has always been motivated to “try new things they say couldn’t be done.”