Donor cornea procurement: six-year review of the role of the eye bank in South Australia.

The Lions Eye Bank of South Australia was established six years ago and has collected corneas from 790 donors. The consent rate is currently 82% of requests made. Two-thirds of donors have been male, with mean donor age/year varying from 54 to 64 years (range two to 93 years).

Effectiveness of a decontamination method for donor corneas.

A retrospective study was made of the effectiveness of an eye bank decontamination and storage method. A comparison was made between microbial cultures taken from the limbus at enucleation and from scleral remnants recovered after surgery. Organisms were isolated from the limbus of 73% of donor eyes and from 4% of remnants.

Assessment of the Dutch organ-culture system of corneal preservation within the Eye Bank of South Australia.

Thirteen per cent of all corneas harvested by the Eye Bank of South Australia during 1986 were discarded because storage time in McCarey-Kaufman medium exceeded four days. We have therefore examined the suitability of the Dutch method of long-term corneal storage for our purposes. Twenty-two human corneas that had been discarded from the Eye Bank were assessed using the trypan blue-sucrose staining technique, and then placed into long-term storage for 15 to 17 days.