was claimed that the hospital had not followed the required protocol for infection control, but the investigation was ongoing. Several instances of surgeons performing more operations per day than allowed have also been reported, but it has not been made clear how this would affect sterility of equipment, or how it might plausibly cause infection. In 2022 the digital news publication Scroll.in requested information on the numbers of patients who had contracted such infections from the central health ministry and received information that since 2006, 469 people have either been blinded in one eye or had their vision seriously affected after undergoing surgery at eye camps. Further inquiries indicated that the number was at least 519, but the total number of surgeries for that period was not mentioned. Since the number of eye surgeries performed in India is large – as of 2017 India is claimed to be doing about 6.5 million cataract surgeries per year – more than the US, Europe and China put together – this is a very small percentage. Africa Cataracts are the main cause of blindness in Africa, and affect approximately half of the estimated seven million blind people on the continent, a number which is expected to expand with population growth by about 600,000 people per year. The cataract surgery rate is about 500 per million per year as of 2005. Progress has been made on gathering information on epidemiology, distribution and impact of cataracts within Africa, but significant barriers and challenges remain. These barriers are variously reported as relating to awareness, acceptance and cost. Some studies reported community and family dynamics as barriers. Cataract surgical rate was reported as lower in females in the majority of studies. The higher cataract surgical coverage found in some settings in South Africa, Libya, and Kenya suggest that many barriers to surgery can be overcome. According to the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness there is only about one ophthalmologist per million people in some sub-Saharan countries, and according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information the percentage of adults above the age of 50 in western sub-Saharan Africa who are blind because of cataracts is about 6% – the highest rate in the world. A mathematical model using survey data from sub-Saharan Africa shows that the incidence of cataracts varies significantly across the continent, and therefore that the required rate of surgery to maintain a