• IMPACT Foundation aims to prevent and alleviate disability in developing countries. It adresses prevention and cure combined.

• The Foundation funds mobile detection and treatment clinics. A mobile hospital train and boat travel with medical equipment and staff. They screen for potentially disabling conditions, as well as providing medical and surgical treatment, immunisation, training, and health education. The train or boat stays in each area for 1-3 months. IMPACT screened 2m people in 2008 at a cost of 94p per person.

• IMPACT addresses the main avoidable causes of disability: malnutrition, vitamin and mineral deficiencies, unsafe birthing, lack of immunisation, birth defects, ageing issues, and diseases transmitted through unsafe water and sanitation.

• IMPACT has restored sight, mobility or hearing, or repaired cleft lip, for nearly 819,000 people, and prevented a lifetime of disability to many thousands more.

• Advocacy in The Philippines has lead to iodine being added to salt and flour being vitamin-enriched to alleviate common causes of childhood blindness and disability.

• In the target countries, the number of doctors per 100,000 of population is: India 60; Nepal 21; Bangladesh 26; Tanzania 2; Kenya 14; The Philippines 58; Sri Lanka 55; Cambodia 16; Pakistan 74. The figure in the UK is 230.

• Poverty increases the chances of becoming disabled. Disability leads to further poverty and often to early death. ‘Health is wealth’.