Sri Lanka has sent more than a quarter of the corneas collected by its National Eye Bank to recipients overseas over the past 15 years, officials said at a media briefing at Suwasiripaya on Thursday (May 7) marking the institution’s 15th anniversary.
Of more than 17,000 corneas collected since the National Eye Bank’s establishment, around 12,000 have been used in transplant surgeries inside Sri Lanka, while between 4,000 and 4,500 have been exported or donated to patients abroad in response to international demand, the Eye Bank told reporters at the briefing organised by the Ministry of Health and Mass Media.
Eye Bank Director Dr. Kusum Ratnayake said Sri Lanka is now internationally recognised as a leading source of corneal donation, with strong demand from countries including Singapore, South Africa and several other Asian nations. Around 84 percent of Sri Lankans have expressed willingness to donate their eyes after death, he said, placing the country among the world’s top eye-donation nations.
Director of the National Eye Hospital Dr. Jayaruwan Bandara said the Eye Bank has helped restore sight to thousands of local patients free of charge. He urged the public to use proper referral pathways for specialised eye care and warned against unverified clinics. Early detection of vision conditions among schoolchildren remains a priority, with screening programmes in place to prevent long-term visual impairment, he said.
The briefing also outlined expansion plans for the next 15 years, including upgrades to corneal preservation facilities and broader public-awareness work on tissue donation.
Sri Lanka’s voluntary eye-donation tradition, rooted in Buddhist culture and championed by the late Dr. Hudson Silva from the late 1950s, made it one of the earliest non-Western countries to operate a structured eye bank for international corneal exchange.
