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NZer of the Year claims don't add up
Claims about the role New Zealander of the Year (NZY) Ray Avery has played in helping the world’s cataract blind don’t add up.

At the 2010 NZY Awards Avery was hailed as a scientist whose inventions included “intraocular lenses (IOLs) to combat blindness and the laboratories and technology needed to make them”.

Investigations conducted by The United Press reveal that this claim is not supported by the facts – Avery neither invented IOLs nor the technology needed to make them.

Despite the claim being false it has been repeated as fact to New Zealanders by dozens of media outlets since the awards were held in February.

IOLs were invented by British ophthalmologist, Sir Harold Ridley, during the Second World War before Avery was born.

An IOL is a thin piece of clinical quality plastic implanted into the eye to replace the eye’s natural clouded lens or cataract.

While low-cost generic IOLs – which Avery is often also credited with inventing in the media and also on his Wikipedia page – were on the market before Avery worked in the industry.

In the early 1990s Avery was employed by the Australian non-profit organisation, the Fred Hollows Foundation (FHF), as their technical director to help build two IOL manufacturing plants for them; one in Eritrea and the other in Nepal.

Avery told the United Press that he didn’t invent IOLs but said what he did invent was an improved way of cutting and polishing the lenses while they were being processed.

This, said Avery, allowed the FHF to produce an “IOL surface that was better than anything else on the market”.

Asked why he hadn’t corrected the widespread misinformation surrounding his IOL inventions Avery said he “could not be held responsible” for what people wrote about him.

He said he had told the NZY company and the media exactly what he told this newspaper.

“Sometimes people just write stuff to make it sound simple, but it’s a complicated story,” he said.

But there is more information distributed by the NZY awards about his role in developing IOLs that is incorrect.

According to the NZY awards, Avery’s invention made “life-changing lenses affordable to the poorest of the poor for the first time”.

But the FHF factories in Eritrea and Nepal began production in 1994 while Indian non-profit organisation, Aurolab, had already been producing and selling cut-price generic lenses for two years.

Aurolab co-founder, David Green, who is credited abroad with being the first to make IOLs available to the poor, said that their “high-tech” plant sold 37,000 lenses in 1992 and its production then grew by “37 percent annually”.

“Since 1992, Aurolab has supplied more than 7 million lenses to its customers in India and more than 120 other countries worldwide,” the company states on its website.

Avery said that while Aurolab did start making generic IOLs first, unlike the FHF they didn’t have a significant impact on the world market and only used them in their own eye hospital.

“They (Aurolab) started manufacturing 18 months before us but they certainly didn’t have the volume that we did – they were an Indian manufacturer and no one trusted them.”

“They didn’t collapse the (international IOL) price because no one would buy off them.”

In the official NZY Awards media release former prime minister and NZY Award patron, Jim Bolger, said that “because of Avery, an estimated 30 million people suffering from cataract blindness will have regained their sight by 2020”.

Yet the World Health Organisation told The United Press this week that its most recent assessment of the total number of cataract blind was 17.6 million people.
Moreover, production statistics from the FHF factories in Eritrea and Nepal show their combined output between 1994 and 2010 was 4 million lenses.

In 2003, the FHF celebrated just its one millionth cataract operation.

Asked to justify the seemingly high 30 million figure, Avery said it included not just the completely blind, but those who were losing their sight as well.

Avery said the FHF had made its IOL technology “open source” – available to other companies to replicate – and that some had done so.

Questioned as why the few references to his work on the FHF websites stated only that he was the foundation’s technical director at the labs, Avery said the organisation didn’t acknowledge his work because it did not want to lose donors to his own Medicine Mondiale organisation.

When asked to help provide evidence for their claims on Avery, NZY national awards coordinator, Grant McCabe, said to speak to Avery’s publicity officer.

Labels: fraud, media, new zealander of the year, ray avery