http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/save-millions-lives-article-1.142296O

How to save millions of lives now 

By BRIAN MULLANEY| NEW YORK DAILY NEWS |AUG 12, 2013 | 4:30 AM  

Imagine if there was a miracle surgery that could give your blind daughter her eyesight back — but you couldn’t afford it. And every hospital that you brought her to, begging for help, turned you away. So she remained blind as the years passed by.

I met such a father recently in Ranchi, India, a city in eastern India.

After years of watching his daughter suffer, he saw a tiny newspaper ad offering free surgery for the poor. He and his daughter Priya traveled 150 kilometers to reach our partner hospital.

The surgery Priya waited six years for took just 15 minutes. The next morning, when she opened her eyes and could see, her father cried. So did we.

A one-of-a-kind fairy tale?

Hardly. In the bed next to Priya was another blind girl who had been waiting eight years for the same surgery. In fact, the entire hospital was filled with kids who had been waiting years for all kinds of life-saving surgeries. Just like at hundreds of hospitals I’ve visited over the past 20 years.

In the developing world today, more than 50 million children and adults are suffering and dying needlessly because they can’t afford the simple, inexpensive surgery that could save them.

Lack of access to surgery for the poor is the biggest global health problem no one has ever heard of. According to the World Health Organization, 2 billion people in the world have no access to basic surgical care. Harvard’s renowned Dr. Paul Farmer sums it up: “Surgery is the neglected stepchild of global health.”
l Some 6 million children born with water on the brain or a hole in the heart are dying as they wait for surgery they’ll never receive.
l About 2 million children born with clubfoot will never be able to stand or walk properly because they don’t have $250 .
l Roughly 15 million severely burned children will go through life horribly disfigured because they can’t afford a $500 surgery.
l And around 20 million blind children and adults, half of all the blind people in the world, will remain blind for the rest of their lives because they can’t afford a cataract surgery that costs just $35.

Why is it so hard to provide these simple surgeries?

Some say it isn’t because it is so hard but because it is so easy.

Prajwal Ciryam, a Fulbright scholar, calls it “the tragedy of easy problems.” Proven, affordable and scalable solutions to global health problems are neglected because people are inherently more attracted to difficult, unsolvable problems. It’s why “glamorous” attempts to cure complex diseases attract more funding than mundane problems like cataract surgery, which was pioneered in 1949.

The sad part is that these easy problems continue to cause massive amounts of completely unnecessary suffering.

Tens of millions of lives could be saved within a very short amount of time if we devoted attention to even just a few of these proven, low-cost surgical solutions. The infrastructure to provide these surgeries already exists today in 90% of developing countries — including experienced, qualified surgeons and fully-equipped operating rooms.

And the funding needed is very modest.

By one estimate, it would cost just $700 million dollars to restore the eyesight of 20 million blind children and adults. In 2012, the U.S. government spent $700 million on AIDS — every two weeks. The Gates Foundation just spent $500 million on its new headquarters for 500 employees.

I have some personal interest in this particular crusade. In 1999, I co-founded Smile Train, a children’s charity focused on one of the most mundane problems ever — cleft lip and palate. The cure for clefts is a simple surgery that takes as little as 45 minutes and costs as little as $250.

Our strategy was to raise the money ourselves. We mailed almost half a billion fund-raising letters. We ran ads in every major newspaper in America. We produced a film that was seen by millions.

Millions of donors responded with hundreds of millions of dollars in donations which we used to empower local surgeons in developing countries. With modest grants, these local hospitals quickly ramped up the number of children they help to unprecedented heights. Smile Train’s surgeries grew from 2,000 a year to 120,000 a year. And next year, Smile Train will provide its 1 millionth surgery.