He was nominated for CNN Hero of the year 2011
The 2006 Ramon Magsaysay Award for International
Understanding CITATION for Sanduk RuitRamon Magsaysay Award Presentation
Ceremonies31 August 2006, Manila, Philippines
Cataracts,
bane of the aging, are like clouds that gather over the eyes. They are the most
common cause of blindness in Asia. In Nepal alone some half a million people
are affected, the majority of whom live in remote areas where the curse of
blindness is magnified by a harsh terrain and pervasive poverty. Yet, most of
these people need not be blind at all, says Dr. Sanduk Ruit. Only the absence
of medical care condemns them to darkness. Ruit, an eye surgeon and medical
director of the Tilganga Eye Centre in Kathmandu, wants them to see again.
Sanduk
Ruit was born in a mountain area of Nepal so poor and remote that the nearest
school was eleven days away, by foot. Diligence brought him a scholarship to be
educated in India. When he was seventeen, his older sister died of tuberculosis
and this painful loss led him to medicine. Upon completing medical school in
India, he returned to Nepal as a government health officer. Following an
assignment with the WHO Nepal Blindness Survey in 1980, he completed a
residency in ophthalmology. Later, in Australia, he learned from his friend and
mentor Dr. Fred Hollows the latest techniques in cataract microsurgery using
implanted intraocular lenses. By 1988, he was introducing the new techniques in
Nepal.
There,
Ruit faced the resistance of local eye surgeons. He patiently taught them the
new procedures and began to win converts. With backing from the Nepal Eye
Program Australia, he began trekking to Nepal’s far-flung towns to conduct eye
camps, on-the-spot surgeries in which he almost instantly restored the sight of
grateful country folk, hundreds at a time. While doing so, Ruit devised
techniques to achieve hospital-quality standards of precision and sterility
under makeshift conditions. These included his now-famous suture-less procedure
that speeds cataract surgery and reduces patients’ recovery time.
Ruit
opened the Tilganga Eye Centre (TEC) in 1994. It has become the hub of an
ambitious expansion of eye-care services. In partnership with the Himalayan
Cataract Project, TEC today manages six regional primary eye-care centers in
Nepal. It operates Nepal’s only successful eye bank. It trains eye-care
paramedics, medical residents, and nurses as well as visiting surgeons from
Asia, North America, Europe, and Australia who come to learn Dr. Ruit’s
techniques. It also manufactures extremely high-quality intraocular lenses for
surgery and makes these once-exorbitant implants—nearly 1.5 million of them so
far—available to needy recipients in some fifty countries for less than US
$5.00 apiece. Meanwhile, the Centre treats three thousand patients a week and
has performed more than ninety thousand operations since its inception. Surgery
at TEC is inexpensive and prorated according to ability to pay; the poor pay
nothing at all.
Today,
Ruit’s mobile eye camps have expanded to China, India, Bangladesh, Cambodia,
and even to North Korea, where in June 2006 he and his team performed
sight-restoring surgery on over 1,000 patients in six days.
More
than five hundred surgeons across Asia have now learned Dr. Ruit’s pathbreaking
techniques. "We Nepalese have never been known to give anything to other
parts of the world," he says. "I feel proud that we have given this
expertise to many countries."
The
good doctor Ruit is famous for his stamina at the operating table and can
perform one hundred surgeries in a single day. At fifty-one, he remains
inspired by the joyful satisfaction of giving the gift of sight, especially to
the poor.
"Everyone
deserves good vision," he says. "There can be no children of a lesser
god."
In
electing Sanduk Ruit to receive the 2006 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and
International Understanding, the board of trustees recognizes his placing Nepal
at the forefront of developing safe, effective, and economical procedures for
cataract surgery, enabling the needlessly blind in even the poorest countries
to see again.
Dr. Sanduk Ruit, MD
Co-Director Himalayan Cataract Project
Dr.
Sanduk Ruit grew up in a remote village in Eastern Nepal. He was educated in
India and completed his three-year ophthalmology residency at the prestigious
All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi, India. He also completed
fellowships in microsurgery in the Netherlands and Australia as well as
additional ophthalmic training at the Wilmer Eye Institute of the Johns Hopkins
University School of Medicine and the University of Michigan. Dr. Ruit met
Professor Fred Hollows from Sydney, Australia in 1986 when Hollows visited
Nepal as a World Health Organization consultant. He went on to study with him
for 14 months at Sydney’s Prince of Wales Hospital. Hollows was Ruit’s mentor
and an inspiration to him. The two men believed in the right of people with
treatable blindness to have their sight restored, and that people in developing
countries deserved access to the same quality of care and technology as those
in the Developed World. They shared an ambitious vision: the elimination of
avoidable blindness in the Himalayan region, a process they believed needed to
be driven by local people.
When
Dr. Ruit returned to Nepal he was instrumental in the formation of the Nepal
Eye Program and worked on a large epidemiological survey of blindness in Nepal.
He was the first Nepali doctor to perform cataract surgery with intraocular
lens implants and pioneered the use of microsurgical extra-capsular cataract
extraction with posterior chamber lens implants in remote eye camps. Although
other important international organizations sponsored eye camps in the region
providing eye care and training local ophthalmologists, the camps established
by Dr. Ruit were the first to introduce the use of intraocular lenses in
cataract surgery. Put simply, this is the removal of the cataract and insertion
of a plastic intraocular lens. Before this, people who had cataract surgery in
Nepal were given crude, Coke bottle-thick glasses that allowed only a poor
quality of vision with terrible distortions in peripheral vision that made life
on uneven trails difficult. Moreover, if the glasses were lost or broken the
patients were unable to focus and again rendered blind.
Dr.
Ruit later developed a sutureless form of the surgery, a technique that allows
safe, high-volume, low-budget operations. A masterful surgeon, he can perform
dozens of flawless cataract operations at eye camps over a 12-hour day – and
laugh over a meal with his team at the end of it. Dr. Ruit insists on high
standards from everyone and always raises the bar for his own work, an attitude
that gains him enormous respect from all who work with him.
Dr.
Ruit helped found the Tilganga Eye Centre, the Nepal Eye Program and its
Australian counterpart, Nepal Eye Program Australia (NEPA). Using Tilganga as
his base of operations, Ruit continues to upgrade the state of eye care in
Nepal, training surgeons and paramedics, and furthering his vision to cure
blindness throughout the Himalayas. Doctors Ruit and Tabin have been teaching
their cataract surgery technique at the American Academy of Ophthalmology and
at the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeons annual meetings.
Dr. Sanduk Ruit awarded honorary order of australia
“If
I've done nothing in my life but encourage Ruit, I'll have died a happy man.”
Fred Hollows
Nepalese
surgeon, Dr Sanduk Ruit, long-term friend and colleague of Fred Hollows, has
been appointed an honoraryOfficer of the Order of Australia (AO).
Dr
Ruit recently visited Australia to mark the 15th year of The Fred Hollows
Foundation and to discuss future expansion plans for sight-saving programs in
Nepal and around the world.
He
has been a partner of The Fred Hollows Foundation since its inception in 1992.
In
one of many interviews Fred gave during the final years of his battle with
cancer he highlighted the high regard in which he held Dr Ruit.
“If
I've done nothing in my life but encourage Ruit, I'll have died a happy man,”
he said.
Since
Fred’s death, Dr Ruit has worked tirelessly to end avoidable blindness in
developing countries, personally performing approximately 70,000
sight-restoring operations.
“We
are truly proud to work alongside the remarkable Dr Ruit, a man who has done
more than anyone else to make Fred’s vision a reality,” said Brian Doolan, The
Foundation’s CEO.
When
Fred died in 1993, The Foundation continued its partnership with Dr Ruit,
establishing the Tilganga Eye Centre in Kathmandu, incorporating the Fred
Hollows Intraocular Lens (IOL) Laboratory, which produces the high-quality
lenses necessary for modern cataract surgery.
Today,
Dr Ruit and The Foundation continue to work together, training local doctors
from countries such as Bangladesh, Cambodia and North Korea to perform modern
cataract surgery, and carrying out thousands of sight-saving operations each
year.
“There
is no doubt Fred would be lifting a congratulatory glass of whisky for his
great mate, Dr Ruit,” said Mr Doolan.
“However,
both Fred and Dr Ruit would also see this as a time to draw attention to the
work ahead,” Mr Doolan said.
