An eye care and treatment programme for cured lepers living in settlements at the peripheries of the Ho Polyclinic, formerly a leprosarium, is underway.

It is under the auspices of Life for the Living Medical and Humanitarian Centre (LILIMEM), a health-oreinted Ho-based non-governmental organization (NGO), supported by Cross Cause Charity, an Irish charity.

Reverend Benjamin Bankas, Director of LILIMED, told the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in Ho that two, batches of the cured lepers had been sent to the Save the Nation’s Sight Clinic, at East Legon, for treatment.

He said eye diseases being treated under the programme include cataract, refraction errors and trachoma.

Rev. Bankas said, Cross Cause Charity paid for screening to select the afflicted, through campaigns for resources by Conor Hughes and Kieran Lavery, its directors abroad.

He said the Irish charity also sponsored the NGO’s outreach programmes to identify communities and segments of society in dire need of eye care.

Rev. Bankas said the NGO’s biggest challenge was its inability to provide spectacles for the increasing number of people who needed the them.

He said the NGO was currently undertaking an outreach programme in the Afram Plains to identify those in need of eye care.

He said Dr. Thomas Tontie Baah, Director of the Save the Nation’s Sight Clinic, undertook eye treatment virtually free of charge for the lepers - provided them meals and transport from Ho to the clinic.

Dr Baah told the GNA that, he was motivated to undertake the activity by his association with two blind relatives, who he had to guide while young.

The Director of the Clinic said, he believed there were many people in the rural areas with eye conditions that needed the attention of specialists, but added that some of these conditions could be reserved .

Dr Baah expressed regret that, such people hardly received help as eye care services were concentrated in the urban areas, where ophthalmologists engaged in sometimes fanciful eye needs of the rich.

He called on Government to tailor health policies such that it would bring eye care services to the needy majority.**