Donor cornea for keratoplasty. Tropical factors influencing its usability and viability.

IN keratoplasty, concepts regarding the effects of various influencing factors like climatic circumstances, the time interval between death and removal, the cause of death, the interval between removal and use, and the bacterial flora, on the usability and viability of donor human corneas have not been adequately emphasized in the literature. The scanty reports so far are mostly from countries with moderate climatic variations and near identical conditions. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to report on these various factors that may have an important bearing on the viability and usability of donor corneas in such tropical conditions as exist in India. The report is based on observations made on 775 donor human eyes processed in this unit during the four years since 1960; 291 of these eyes were used for transplantation surgery.