PBS高端访谈:为失明者带去光明（在线收听）

JUDY WOODRUFF: It's estimated that as many as 2.5 billion people around the world need prescription eyeglasses, but don't have them. Untreated, we know poor vision keeps people from reaching their full potential. Tonight's Brief But Spectacular features an eye doctor looking for new ways to solve the problem.

DR. ANDREW BASTAWROUS, Eye Surgeon/Inventor: When I was 12 years old, I was told by my teachers that I was a bit slow and that I wasn't paying attention. And then I was taken for an eye test, where they found that I had really poor vision. And when I put on a pair of glasses, I saw that trees have leaves on them for the first time, and my life took a very different course as a consequence of something so simple. I was aware that the thing that happen to me with a pair of glasses may not have been true if I have lived somewhere else. And so I wanted to become a doctor, which I then became, and then I became an eye surgeon and with this burning desire to change this injustice. Worldwide, there's 2.5 billion people, so one in three who need a pair of glasses and can't get them. There's 36 million people who are blind, four in every five of whom shouldn't be, because their cause of blindness is curable. In 2011, I left my job as an eye surgeon in the U.K., and my wife and our 1-year-old son packed our bags and moved to Kenya. We went there because we wanted to really understand the needs of a large population. And to do it, we had to establish 100 eye clinics, and, in the course of doing so, just realized how big the scale of the problem was, but also how much potential there was to change lives if this were done differently. When I was working in the field in Kenya, I was taking 100,000 pounds' worth of eye equipment and a team of 15 people to understand why people couldn't see and what the causes were. What we then started to do as Peek was creating mobile technology that could do the same assessments, but in the hands of non-specialists. So, the first thing that we built was a vision test that could measure somebody's vision in any language. And then we built a tool that would sit on the phone which would allow you to see inside the eye, so you could see the back of the eye and understand why somebody can't see.

When I was working in Kenya, it became apparent how many people had access to a mobile device. I would go to places that had no roads, no electricity and no water, but in those same places, people had a mobile phone. An incredible doctor said to me: In the community that I work, there are children in the schools who can't see. And when I send my nurse from the hospital to go and see them, she finds them, but she spends all day in one school to find around 5 percent of the children with a problem. And I can no longer afford to send her because the clinic is too busy. So we said, why don't we train teachers to do the same thing? And so teachers started using our Peek Acuity app to measure vision, to get a simulation of what that child could see, and then it would automate a message to that child's parents, to the head teacher and to the hospital. So, suddenly, everybody knew that child existed with a solvable problem. The first time we trialed it, 25 teachers screened 21,000 children in just nine days. We then went on to scale that up to 300,000 children covering the entire district. The government of Botswana has shown incredible leadership and have committed to screen and treat every single schoolchild in the country, making them the first country in the world where an entire generation no longer have to suffer this problem. My name is Dr. Andrew Bastawrous, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on eradicating avoidable blindness.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So good to hear about that. And you can find more episodes of our Brief But Spectacular series at PBS.org/NewsHour/Brief.

朱迪·伍德拉夫：据估测，全球有多达25亿人需要验光，但却没有验光。如果不进行治疗的话，我们都知道视力不好会影响人，让人无法充分发挥自己的潜能。今晚的《简短而精彩》将聚焦一位眼科医生，这位医生寻求新方法来解决上述问题。

安德鲁，眼科医生/发明人：我12岁的时候，我的老师告诉我，我做什么事都有种慢半拍的感觉，说我总走神。然后我去做了验光才发现自己视力很差。我戴上眼镜后，第一次看到树上有好多叶子，我的人生就因为戴上眼镜这件简单的不能再简单的事情而走上了另一条道路。我发现，如果我生活在别处的话，那么戴上眼镜就能解决的事情或许就不会发生了。因此，我想成为一名医生。后来，这个愿望实现了。再然后，我成了一名眼科医生。我一心想着改变这种不公平的情况。全球有25亿人，而1/3的人需要戴眼镜却没条件。有3600万名盲人，4/5的盲人本来可以不用失去光明的，因为他们致盲的病因是可以治疗的。2011年，我辞去了自己在英国的眼科医生工作，和妻子还有1岁的儿子收拾行李搬到了肯尼亚。我们选择肯尼亚是因为我们真心希望了解大群人口的需求。为了实现这个目标，我们必须设立100家眼科机构。在做这件事的过程中，我才意识到这个问题牵涉甚广，如果用不同的方法来做，就既有可能改变很多人的人生。在肯尼亚工作的时候，我带着价值10万磅眼科设备和15名组员去探寻致盲的原因。然后，我们尝试开创可以进行同类评估的移动技术，但是是由非专业人士负责。我们做的第一件事就是做视力测试，可以在被测试者所说语言不同的情况下测试他们的视力。然后，我们打造了一种工具，这种工具可以放在电话上，可以让人看到眼球内部的情况——可以看到眼球背部，也可以了解致盲的原因。

我在肯尼亚工作的时候，越来越明确究竟有多少人能接触到移动设备。我会去没有公路、电、水的地方实地考察，但这些地方的人都没有移动电话。一位医生跟我说了一句难以置信的话：在我所工作的社群，很多学校的儿童都看不见。我派护士从医院去探望这些儿童，这位护士也找到了这些儿童，不过，她在一所学校花了一整天的时间，最后发现有5%的儿童都有眼部疾病。后来，我也没法再派这名护士去那里了，因为医院忙不开。于是我们就想：为什么不培训老师做这件事呢？所以，一些教师开始用我们的Peek Acuity应用程序来测视力，可以模拟儿童能看到的东西，然后自动发送信息给儿童的父母、班主任、医院。所以，顷刻间，所有人都知道那个孩子存在的问题是可以解决的。我们第一次这么尝试的时候，25名教师在短短9天的时间里对21万名儿童进行了验光。接下来，我们将这个数字扩充到了30万——覆盖了整个地区。博茨瓦纳政府展现了无与伦比的领导力——致力于为本国所有在校儿童提供验光和治疗。此举使博茨瓦纳成为世界上首个整代人都不再遭遇这个问题的国家。我是安德鲁，这是我本期带来的与根除可避免失明有关的《简短而精彩》。

朱迪·伍德拉夫：很高兴能听到您的分享。更多节目，可浏览PBS.org/NewsHour/Brief上《简短而精彩》的特辑。