L’AQUILA – “We need to increase the number of donations in the centre-south, to date the situation is better in the northern territories, for this reason we need to get to work in the various hospitals with special staff and promote the stimulus activity at the family members, also starting from the fact that the cornea transplant, being considered a tissue transplant and not an organ transplant, does not imply the ‘trap’ of sampling while the heart is beating; it can be taken even with a stopped heart and it is an aspect that can reassure and give a few more hours for planning”.
Thus Professor Emilio Balestrazzi, ophthalmologist of national and international fame, former director of the ophthalmology clinic of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart at the Gemelli Polyclinic in Rome, founder, in the nineties, of the Eagle Eye Bank, which on May 18 will be in the regional capital on the occasion of the sixteenth national course entitled “Sibo 2024: people, innovation and surgery”.
During the conference, which will be held in the “Luigi Zordan” conference center of the University of L’Aquila, promoted by the Italian Society of Eye Banks (Sibo) and in which all 12 structures present on Italian territory have joined, will intervene, among others, the president of Sibo, Diego Ponzin, and the director of the National Transplant Center, Giuseppe Feltrin. Doing the honors will be the director of the Eye Bank of L’Aquila, Germano Genitti, head of the Ophthalmology department of the San Salvatore hospital in L’Aquila, former vice president of Sibo (currently a councillor), who has the role of scientific director of the course.
Balestrazzi, who was the teacher of many professionals in L’Aquila, in addition to appealing for greater awareness on the subject of donations, retraces the main stages that led to the birth of the Banca degli Occhi dell’Aquila, the second launched in Italy after that of Veneto, with its decisive and far-sighted contribution.
“I came from the Sapienza eye clinic of the Umberto I polyclinic in Rome – he explains – I took over the management of the L’Aquila eye clinic in 1988 and from that moment on, my group and I set out to carry out new activities, above all to raise awareness of the donation and to carry out corneal transplants as much as possible which were needed at that moment”.
“We started by sending the corneas from the Eye Bank of Baltimore, then the Health Directorate came to us greatly – he recalls -, as an eye bank in Italy was not yet functioning. We reached crazy figures for the time, we did 150 corneal transplants a year, numbers that even today not many can reach in the national territory. This led us to obtain funding from the Region which allowed us to establish the first eye bank in central-south in L’Aquila, only Giovanni Rama’s Veneto bank, a great precursor of corneal transplants, was already functioning”.
“This is how this great trend in L’Aquila began which allowed us to reach very important numbers, they came from all over Italy to do corneal transplants – he explains further -. Over time the numbers have changed a lot, at the time ophthalmologists sent patients mainly to two centres, that of Barcelona or Lyon, there was no real regulation which began in ’81 with a law which authorized some centers to collect and transplant. I plastered all of L’Aquila with posters inviting donations, making one of my old minibuses available to promote these operations for corneal transplants.”
“In Italy we have numerous eye banks all perfectly functioning, including the one in L’Aquila, we have some of the best surgeons in the world, distributed uniformly throughout the national territory and there are no longer those endless waiting lists of the past . Today, young surgeons are able to regularly receive tissue or the entire cornea. We are reaping the fruits of great progress, it is almost never essential to transplant the entire cornea but we can do lamellar transplants depending on the type of pathology and this allows us to have much more peaceful post-operative outcomes”, she concludes.
