BACKGROUND AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xlix national support for the project and the survey. The Centers for Disease Control of the U.S. Public Health Service, Atlanta, Georgia, made available the services of Dr. James Lepkowski, to design the survey protocols and draw the survey sample in Nepal. After the results of the pretest were available, Dr. Grasset and I approached Dr. Carl Kupfer, Director of the National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, for help in reviewing the preliminary findings of the feasibility study as well as getting expert advice for planning the survey itself. We are very grateful to Dr. Kupfer for his warm response, the first of many acts of support and kindness he provided throughout the survey (including his very helpful visit to Nepal during the actual survey fieldwork). In December, 1979, the National Eye Institute (NEI) and the Seva Foundation cosponsored a meeting of international experts in eye epidemiology to review the results of the feasibility study and advise on the plan for the Nepal Blindness Survey. Present at that meeting were Ram Prasad Pokhrel, Mario Tarizzo, Barrie Jones, Al Sommers, Hugh Taylor, T. Stephen Jones, Carole West, K. Konyama, Roy Milton, James Lepkowski, and Chandler Dawson, in addition to Nicole GrassP.t and myself. Ed McManus of NEI and Girija Brilliant, Robert Friedland, and Jahanara Romney from the Seva Foundation also kindly gave encouragement and support. That important and helpful meeting produced many positive suggestions and not a few critical comments on what were thought to be overly ambitious aims of the survey. Dr. Lepkowski worked for the next seven months at the Seva Foundation and at the Sur- vey Research Center in Michigan to refine the survey protocols and write the basic survey documents. While this development was going on, Dr. Pokhrel and Dr. Chical in Kathmandu and Dr. Grasset in Europe were working feverishly to get. the project approved and funded. Dr. Pokhrel succeeded in getting the full support of the Nepalese government be- hind his dream of conquering needless blindness. In August, 1980, a preliminary meeting was held in Kathman- du with Dr. Al Kolstad, of the University of Oslo, Norway (who was just joining the project as programme ophthalmologist), Dr. Pokhrel, Dr. Grasset, Jim Lepkowski, Birgitta Kolstad, Girija Brilliant, and myself. During that visit, the survey schedule was finished and ad- ditional pretesting of survey protocols was carried out. Including the pretest, over 3,000 individuals were examined during the field testing of ophthalmic protocols; some national surveys do not have such a large sample in the total study population.
