ETMC Honored for Eye Donations

TYLER — ETMC Tyler was recognized May 5 by UT Southwestern Medical Center’s Transplant Services Center as a member of the “Leadership Circle” of top eye donor hospitals in North Texas with 20 cornea donations in 2010. Transplant Services Center, one of the nation’s longest continually accredited tissue and eye banks, provides corneas, sclera, bone grafts, heart valves, and skin to the communities served by ETMC as well as areas all over the United States. Since 2001, ETMC has provided 203 corneas for transplant. There are an estimated 43,000 cornea transplants and more than 800,000 tissue transplants annually in the United States. Tissue donation/transplant includes skin, bone, heart valves, veins and tendons. Cornea transplants can relieve patients with glared or blurred vision, painful swelling and effectively avoid corneal blindness.