Man of Vision

He crusades against blindness

Sir John Wilson strides into his office outside London, his hands at waist level, his fingers spread like antennae. Easing into a chair, he turns to a visitor and launches into a discussion of his life's work. Through his Royal Commonwealth Society for the Blind and the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness, Wilson in the past three decades has helped establish blindness centers in over 80 nations. These centers are designed primarily to help those of the world's 42 million blind whose sight can be restored --and to prevent the diseases that still cause most of the blindness in developing countries. Last year, while organizing the work of restoring sight to 141,000 people, he traveled 50,000 miles. That would be a grueling undertaking for anyone, but for Wilson, the difficulties were even greater. For he too is blind.

It was a school accident at the age of twelve, not disease, that cost Wilson his sight. Resolutely, he went on to take a degree in law and sociology at Oxford, then to aid the British war effort by placing the blind at work alongside sighted people in factories--"making shell cases and bits and pieces of transport vehicles and aircraft." After the war, at 26, Wilson was sent on a Commonwealth tour to make a survey of people blinded during the conflict. Everywhere he encountered the sightless. But it soon became evident that malnutrition and disease, not bullets and shrapnel, had cost most of them their vision. A few years later, traveling to Nakong in northern Ghana, Wilson and his new wife Jean discovered villagers so accustomed to blindness that they found it difficult to believe the rest of the world could see. Recalls Wilson: "A blind farmer taught me how to plant grain along a straight piece of bamboo. Jean accompanied the blind women with their water buckets as they felt their way along the hemp rope from the well."

As founder of the society and its director since 1950, and as president of the agency since its inception in 1975, Wilson has devoted most of his attention to four diseases that account for two-thirds of the blindness in the world:

> River blindness, also called onchocerciasis, is caused by infection from a worm carried by flies, and occurs particularly in West Africa, Guatemala and Mexico. The World Bank, in a project to eradicate the disease in seven African nations within 12 years, has pledged $150 mil lion to spray the flies' breeding waters.

> Trachoma, prevalent in the Middle East, has been linked to a variety of housefly that needs salinated water during its breeding cycle, and gets it from the human eye. Says Wilson: "It can dive-bomb the eye and be in and out before you can blink." The disease-causing microorganism is deposited during the attacks. Blindness can be prevented by applying antibiotics around the eye. The cost: only 50-c- per patient per year.

> Cataracts, the clouding of the eye's lens, have blinded millions of people in Asia and the Indian subcontinent. In these areas, surgery costing as little as $5 per patient can remove the occluded lens and restore some vision. Wilson reaches the cataract victims by setting up temporary eye camps in remote villages. There surgeons perform more than 100 operations per day on patients from the surrounding area. When a blind man's relatives lead him in, says Wilson, "they are usually bossing him around, bored with having to care for this useless invalid. After the operation, when the family leaves the camp, he is a man transformed, his status restored."

> Malnutrition blindness, or xerophthalmia, is the leading cause of blindness in children. Though incurable in the final stages, it can be prevented by 12-c- worth of vitamin A concentrate four times a year, or a daily handful of green vegetables. In the famine winter of 1972 in Bangladesh, 100,000 infants lost their sight. Says Wilson: "Of all the causes of blindness, this is the most obscene."

Wilson, whose efforts on behalf of the blind were recognized last year when he won the prestigious Albert Lasker Special Public Service Award, has a powerful ally for his crusade. The World Health Organization has launched a drive to eliminate preventable blindness by the year 2000. In the meantime, Wilson plans to continue, as the title of his autobiography puts it, Travelling Blind, to give others the gift of sight.

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