Adelaide's Australian of the Year 2020, James Muecke stops blindness abroad and battling type 2 diabetes at home

James Muecke's first medical work after graduating from Adelaide University was in Kenya.
Image courtesy msn.com

Adelaide ophthalmologist James Muecke, Australian of the Year for 2020, has impacted the wider world in programmes to prevent blindness through surgery and has turned to the Australian problem of type 2 diabetes as a “looming catastrophe for our health system”.

In 2000, Dr Muecke was a founder of Vision Myanmar at the South Australian Institute of Ophthalmology and later help set up Sight For All, aiming to create a world where everyone can see. Sight for All uses Australian and New Zealand eye specialists to train overseas doctors. across many of the poorest countries in Asia, including Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar with an estimated benefit to a million people. Children with blindness were surviving and keeping their vision as part of “fantastic results”.  

More recently Dr Muecke's work has focused on preventing the leading cause of blindness in Australian adults — type 2 diabetes. – affecting nearly one in 10 Australians.

Muecke called for a tax on sugar and said confronting advertising for sweet products, particularly during children's television time, similar to anti-smoking campaigns, was warranted. Clearer labelling of sweet products, and for those products with high sugar content, was also needed.

Adelaide-born Muecke trained as a doctor at Adelaide University but began his career in Kenya. He moved back to South Australia to became an eye surgeon and blindness prevention pioneer. He was made a member of the Order of Australian in 2012 and received the Adelaide University vice chancellor’s alumni award in 2019. Dr Muecke was forced to stop doing the delicate eye surgery he loved because of an inherited medical condition.