2007 Outstanding Humanitarian Service Award

 
Alessandro Pezzola, MD

Alessandro Pezzola, MD was nominated by the Societa' Oftalmologica Italiana to receive this year’s Outstanding Humanitarian Service Award.

Since 1987, Dr. Pezzola has been volunteering his services to plan, raise funds, and build several rural hospitals dedicated to eye surgery for disadvantaged, indigent people living in developing countries. Dr. Pezzola sacrificed his career, his private clinical practice, as well as his income for his humanitarian service. He has also suffered from malaria and other tropical diseases and has been hospitalized three times. He has helped the poorest people of the world, restoring vision through examinations, therapy, and thousands of surgical procedures. Dr Pezzola has been involved in projects in a number of countries, including Zaire, the Ivory Coast, and Ghana. He is currently involved in a project in Indonesia and Mali.

Dr. Pezzola, as one of the founding members of Una Sola Vita Foundation, played a critical role in the establishment of this non-profit association. Una Sola Vita Foundation's primary goal is to provide health care assistance to developing countries without any political, social, or religious prejudice. It has been able to provide this assistance by implementing medical-health programs, such as the building and organizing of new hospitals, the carrying out of medical-surgical prevention programs, and the training of medical and paramedic personnel.

In Zaire, Dr. Pezzola was instrumental in starting an ophthalmic day surgery unit in the villages of Kamituga, Walungu, and Kiwu. This was a particularly difficult mission with rain and floods isolating the team in the forest for up to forty days at a time. Despite the setbacks, Dr. Pezzola and his team performed cataract and glaucoma surgery, trained local doctors to perform basic ophthalmic surgery, and trained local health care personnel. As many as two thousand patients were visited and treated. In addition, one hundred patients were treated surgically.

Dr. Pezzola's mission in Ghana included starting an eye unit and surgical center inside the Comboni clinic in the Sogacope Volta region. He also recruited volunteers from Europe to assure continuity to the eye clinic activities. From 1999 to 2001, Dr. Pezzola was involved in starting the eye surgery clinic at the St. Patrick's hospital in Maase, which included teaching local medical and paramedical personnel surgery techniques, the assembly and maintenance of medical equipment, and video recording surgery for post-operative training.

Dr. Pezzola's most recent project has been setting up an ambulatory-based ophthalmic surgical unit in the poorest area of Lombok, Indonesia. The unit will include a new eye clinic where blindness prevention for the poor will be the main goal. The plan is to have local doctors and staff trained to take over the eye clinic within five years. During this project so far, one thousand nine hundred patients have been examined and over two hundred patients have been operated on for cataracts, glaucoma, trachoma, and pterygiums.

Dr. Pezzola continues to divide his time between his practice in Italy and his missions in developing countries. A colleague recalled what Dr. Pezzola told him when talking about his humanitarian experiences: "Everybody in the world likes to stay with the family and my family is there, where people suffer and I can be of help".

For his spirit, code of ethics and social integrity, the Academy is privileged to honor Dr. Alessandr Pezzola with this year's Outstanding Humanitarian Service Award.