Eye care prevention: in January, the Airo association (Italian Association for the Renewal of Ophthalmology) returns to Africa to continue its prevention and awareness work in the world's most disadvantaged countries. "Since 2004, our nonprofit organization has been carrying out these humanitarian missions," explains Vincenzo Orfeo, Airo president. "We spent the first seven years in Ghana, where we returned on January 1st. With this project, we aim to bring some of our European culture to those particularly disadvantaged areas. There, we provide specialist visits and surgeries, for which we need to set up offices (this is the third we're opening), using technologically advanced equipment. These are used to perform cataract surgeries, among the most necessary procedures for local populations of all ages, and with which we achieve superior results."
The goals of Airo are: to improve, through volunteer work, the care of patients suffering from eye diseases or undergoing surgery and to promote the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of eye diseases in Italy and abroad with humanitarian missions. "We try to bring to those countries not only preventive work on ophthalmology - adds Orfeo - but, given that the African people are already disadvantaged in themselves and, if they suffer from problems related to their eyesight, they are marginalized by the rest of the tribe". Among the most frequent pathologies that Airo volunteers treat in Africa, apart from cataracts, there is glaucoma: "Especially in African Americans and young people. If in the West it becomes a problem after the age of 40-60, there even young people suffer a lot and in that case it is very complicated to treat".
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