FUNDING TO screen patients for potential blindness because of diabetes will be provided this year for the west of Ireland, according to Minister of State for Health Mary Wallace.
She said that €750,000 originally allocated last year will be provided in 2009 to screen all 30,000 people between west Limerick and north Donegal with diabetes.
More than 140,000 people in Ireland have diabetes and this is expected to rise to at least 194,000 – or some 5.6 per cent of the population – by 2015.
During a Dáil debate on developing a retinopathy screening programme, the Minister said diabetic retinopathy, a disease of the small blood vessels of the retina, is a common cause of blindness in people aged 60 to 65. Up to 10 per cent of those with diabetes “have sight-threatening retinopathy”.
Fine Gael health spokesman Dr James Reilly said successive governments had failed to act and screening a patient cost €65 but the cost of treating someone with diabetic eye diseases is more than €1,700.
In 2002 the capital cost of establishing a screening unit was €1.98 million with an annual ongoing cost of €2.5 million, but looking after 100 registered blind people cost €2.4 million.
Labour health spokeswoman Jan O’Sullivan said that “about 15 per cent of acute hospital beds are diabetes-related and 10 per cent of the budget is in some way related to diabetes”.
