Dr. Tabin leading Millennium Villages Project team in Bonsaao, Africa.

Salt Lake City, Utah
July 10, 2007

Ophthalmologists from the John A. Moran Eye Center have carried out eye care missions to Ghana, Africa for the past 10 years. During the month of July, the Moran Eye Center will partner in a special mission with the Himalayan Cataract Project and the Millennium Promise at Columbia University to conduct the first of a series of eye care interventions in Bonsaao, Ghana.

Moran Ophthalmologist Dr. Geoffrey Tabin will lead a team of eye specialists and health care workers in tandem with local ophthalmologists from Kumasi, Ghana to provide eye care screening to every single resident of the Bonsaao (pop. 6,000). In addition, every cataract will be treated at a regional clinic that has been prepared for high-volume skills transfer surgical care. Individuals with eye conditions beyond the scope of these clinics (e.g. cornea transplants) will be referred back to the hospital in Kumasi for subspecialty treatment.

The Millennium Villages, takes a comprehensive approach to address extreme poverty in 78 villages across 10 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. This mission is part of the larger United Nations Millennium Development Goals project. (http://www.millenniumpromise.org/site/PageServer?pagename=press_mdg.)

The Millennium Villages are based on a single powerful idea: impoverished villages can transform themselves and meet the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 if they are empowered with proven, powerful, practical technologies. It is a "bottom up" approach to lifting villages in developing countries out of the poverty trap that confines more than one billion people worldwide.

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