Orbis has been working in Zambia since 2011 to increase services and access to quality eye care. In 2012, the charity’s famous Flying Eye Hospital, a unique blend of aviation, medical and educational ingenuity, housed within one of the only Douglas DC-10 aircraft still in operation, conducted a training programme for local eye health teams in the Ndola area of the country.
Orbis hopes the new MD-10 will take to the sky next year and has provided Routesonline with an update in the progress to turn the old freighter aircraft into a fully fledged flying teaching hospital.
The charity is currently running an appeal in line with World Sight Day 2014 to help eliminate avoidable blindness in Ethiopia, which has one of the highest rates of vision loss in the world. One of the conditions the appeal will raise money to tackle is trachoma which was wiped out in the UK 60 years ago, but is still the leading global cause of infectious blindness. Ethiopia has one of the highest known rates of the disease in the world.
