80 Percent of Blindness Cases Are Preventable or Curable

The World Sight Day is an annual event held across the world on the second Thursday of October every year with the aim of attention to the issue of blindness.

According to WEBDA, the commemoration of this day, in fact, is a joint global effort by the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness, the World Health Organization (WHO), and a number of international non-governmental organizations with the aim of eradicating preventable blindness by the year 2020.

The implementation of this plan involves the active participation of the United Nations agencies, governments, eye and sight care organizations, health practitioners, humanitarian organizations, and all those who would like to collaborate in this joint effort to eradicate the causes of blindness by 2020.

On the World Sight Day, it is attempted to draw the public attention to the fact that 80% of blindness cases preventable or curable, and governments, institutions and other sources of investment should be encouraged to invest in global prevention of blindness (The annual economic cost of blindness prevention in the world is estimated at around $ 28 billion).

More than 90 percent of absolute blind (45 million) and half-blind people (135 million) in the world live in developing countries. Every five seconds, one person and every one minute, one child is blinded. In the absence of preventive measures by 2020, another hundred million people will suffer from blindness or low vision for unimportant reasons, mainly cataract.

The designers of this plan hope to reach the goal of blindness prevention through raising public awareness of blindness as a major problem in human societies, controlling four main causes of blindness including cataract, trachoma, onchocerciasis, and child blindness, providing low-vision people with affordable rehabilitation services including eyeglasses and other necessary equipment, providing necessary training to the suppliers of eye care services in order to serve poor and remote communities, establishing the infrastructure needed to provide high quality eye care services in all countries and prevent and treat visual impairment, and performing cataract surgery and vitamin A distribution.