Dr. Claudette Yaméogo, Burkina Faso’s only pediatric ophthalmologist checks on a patient at the Sanou Sourou University Hospital in the city of Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso. (AP)
Isaka Diallo was playing with friends when a stone struck his left eye. For two weeks, his parents searched hospitals in western Burkina Faso for an eye doctor. The village clinic only prescribed painkillers. Other health workers did not know what to do.
When they eventually found Dr. Claudette Yaméogo, Burkina Faso’s only pediatric ophthalmologist, the injury had become too difficult to treat.
“The trauma has become severe,” Yaméogo said of Diallo’s condition as she attended to him recently at the Sanou Sourou University Hospital in the city of Bobo-Dioulasso. “Cases like (Diallo’s) must be treated within the first six hours, but I’m seeing him two weeks later, and it’s already too late.”
It is a common problem in the country of about 23 million people, which has just 70 ophthalmologists.
Yaméogo, who started her practice late last year, said the work is daunting and often requires her to visit — at no cost — families who cannot afford care or cannot make their way to the hospital where she works.
While there is limited data available on eye defects in children in Burkina Faso or in Africa at large, an estimated 450 million children globally have a sight problem that needs treatment, according to the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness.
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