A curable condition

Cataract is a condition in which the eye's lens gets clouded and becomes opaque, obstructing the passage of light. Despite its often devastating effects on patients, in most cases, the clouded lens can be easily removed and replaced by a clear one.

China currently has 9 million blind people, half of them with cataracts. One million new cases of cataract blindness occur each year while doctors can treat only 600,000. This, according to Dr Dennis Lam, is mostly because only half of the country's 24,000 ophthalmologists are trained to perform surgery.

As a result, China has a shockingly low cataract surgery rate. While the United States conducts 10,000 cataract operations per million people, and India 3,900 per million, China can manage only 445 per million - or just some 15 percent of patients requiring an operation.