Commentary: Spreading the word—the gift of sight (eye donation) is the gift of life
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Knowledge is power so goes the adage. “With great power comes great responsibility”—this famous quote aptly summarizes the social and moral duty of those in the medical and paramedical fields to utilize their position in the community to disseminate their hard-earned knowledge for the highest welfare of society. Specifically, it is important to spread the word about organ donation, especially eye donation. The current article in the Indian Journal of Ophthalmology (IJO)[1] is a cross-sectional study across medical students, senior residents, and nursing staff to ascertain their level of understanding as well as commitment toward eye donation. It is unsurprising that despite awareness, commitment to take the pledge to donate is rather low even among the medical fraternity. According to a recent meta-analysis of the data from 1984 to 2020, corneal opacity causes bilateral blindness or moderate to severe visual impairment in around 5.5 million individuals and unilateral blindness in additional 6.2 million people worldwide.[2] According to another systematic review of literature from August 2012 to August 2013, annually only 0.185 million corneal transplants were performed worldwide in 116 countries, and around 12.7 million people were waiting for corneal transplants.[3] This means that only around 1 person got a corneal transplant among 70 people waiting for the graft which is a dismal rate.[3] This unnecessary and avoidable corneal blindness may be avoided by awareness among the medical fraternity and general population regarding the corneal transplant which should increase the rate of corneal donations.[4] Also, during the COVID pandemic, the corneal retrieval program was severely affected, and alternate arrangements of corneal preservation were employed including glycerol-preserved corneas.[5] The USA has 366/100,000 corneal donors per capita according to a global survey published in 2016.[3] The highest number of transplants was in the USA (199/100,000), Lebanon (122/100,000), and Canada (117/100,000).[3] More than half the countries in the globe (approx. 53%) did not have facilities for corneal transplantation.[3] Every year, in India, the eye donation fortnight is celebrated across India from August 25th to September 8th. During this period, pledge forms are distributed by eye hospitals to their patients and relatives, meetings are held, eye donation walks, and banners promoting the cause are put up. This flurry of activity lasts two weeks, and then all is quiet. The role of eye banks in collecting, processing, and distributing tissues is well known. However, their contribution toward the cause of spreading awareness among the general population, helping in hospital-based retrieval programs, and training grief counselors needs to be further augmented and supported by the local governments and non-governmental agencies. There are several aspects regarding the collection and utilization of ocular tissues. Eye donation can occur only after death. Nothing is binding legally for next of kin to donate eyes even if pledged by the deceased before their demise. Early retrieval (within 6 hours) after death, especially in tropical countries, is necessary. Corneoscleral rim excision is the currently preferred mode of retrieval, though whole globes are also retrieved. Media for preserving corneoscleral rims have evolved over the years. Component surgery means one tissue can provide sight to more than one person. The donor is not disfigured after retrieval. The myths and hindrances to corneal donation including religious or other beliefs should be addressed by the leaders of the community to improve the rate of corneal donation. Pledging for corneal donation is easy (https://www.ebai.org/donator-registration/), and the person needs to tell his/her relatives about his/her wish. Eye donation can bring out one or more people from the darkness of blindness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".