London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

A report released today in the 'American Journal of Ophthalmology' asks if we can afford the increasing burden of treatable blindness.

Professor Allen Foster of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Professor Kevin D Frick of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, warn that global blindness is set to increase over the next 20 years, from 44 million affected individuals to 76 million. In their paper 'The Magnitude and Cost of Global Blindness: An Increasing Problem That Can Be Alleviated' they explain that US$102 billion can be saved, and 100 million people prevented from going blind, over the next 20 years through the successful implementation of a global programme called VISION 2020:The Right to Sight - a joint programme of the World Health Organisation and International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness. Their study identifies the potential effect on global productivity of successful interventions aimed at eliminating blindness from five diseases: cataract, trachoma, onchocerciasis, vitamin A deficiency and refractive errors, all of which are prevalent in poor communities.

Mike Whitlam, CEO of VISION 2020: The Right to Sight says: 'This is a growing global tragedy that is costing individuals and the world too much. Do we just sit around and pretend that it is not happening? Governments must take note of these costs because for a small investment in blindness prevention they can stop this tragedy and save billions of dollars'.

If current trends continue the world's population will increase from 6.1 billion in 2000 to 7.5 billion in 2020, with the proportion of people over 65 year predicted to grow from 7% to 9% of the population. This will almost double of the number of blind individuals worldwide. Frick and Foster state that VISION 2020 will reduce the prevalence of blindness worldwide, from 44 million in 2000, to 24 million in 2020, despite world population growth. Shockingly, without VISION 2020, 76 million people will be blind in the year 2020 of which more than half will be blind from curable cataract.

Professor Allen Foster said, 'In the developing world an equivalent of half of the UK population are blind today because they cannot afford or access a cataract operation which would restore their sight, give them independence and an opportunity to be a breadwinner again. At the same time their children suffer from infections and vitamin deficiencies which lead to blindness yet are preventable through simple low cost medical treatments'.

The largest impact VISION 2020 has on the number of people going blind is on those aged 15-64, in other words, the working population. At present 25 million people in this age bracket are blind and without VISION 2020 this number is estimated to reach 43 million by the year 2020. The VISION 2020 programme aims to reduce this figure to 13 million. This of course has a huge economic impact on a country. By eliminating avoidable blindness in this age group, the productivity of the workforce will be enhanced, increasing the opportunities open to those who would have been blind and their potential carers. Carers often include children who are as a result prevented from going to school, thus limiting their potential productivity.

Frick and Foster also found that if one includes those people who are partially sighted the economic savings are more than doubled to over $200 billion. Can we afford not to ensure that VISION 2020 is implemented as successfully as possible?

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