In India thousands of children live in darkness because of a lack of adequate facilities and trained staff. In this edition HEALTH brings you aboard the flying eye hospital which has just touched down there with a team of motivated volunteers on board.

The plane was custom-made by the NGO Orbis. It has a waiting room, an operating room and even an intensive care unit. The nursing staff is from all over the world. They spend ten months of the year traveling the globe carrying out operations and teaching local medics. The NGOs goal is to train, in 15 days, about one hundred local eye doctors. Operations are filmed and shown live in the conference room, in the front of the plane. About twenty local doctors are watching their colleagues, and taking notes in order to repeat the same motions later.

Next HEALTH takes a trip to the optometrists. A test of our visionary strengths but an eye exam can also identify other illnesses and diseases in the body like various forms of cancer and diabetes.

The cornea is a transparent window that allows doctors to see inside the eye where the retina and blood vessels relay information from all around the body. Swollen or dilated veins here could signal an increased risk of heart attack. Connected directly to the brain the optic nerve can also show signs of possible tumors.

And while the eyes can show up illnesses that ly inside, they can also be used to address problems already visible according to Dr Pascal Vital Berard, an eye specialist in Marseille in the south of France.

“We estimate that a good third of children who have dyslexia have , not really a problem with their vision, but a problem of posture which leads to a contraction of the muscles of the eye and prevents it from moving,” he notes. Fitting a pair of specially made glasses he says can help a great deal.

And finally HEALTH ends as always with something strange but true.  This week: tailor made corneas are becoming more popular. Laser surgeons in the UK and US are offering customized eyesight to patients. One centre in the UK has even offered night vision to Special Forces or fighter pilots.