DEVELOPMENT
REPORT - Blindness / World Sight Day
By Jill Moss
This is the VOA Special English Development Report.
An estimated 135 million people have low
vision（近视）. Forty to forty-five million others cannot see at
all. Health experts warn that the number of blind people will increase
sharply as the world population grows, and grows older. They say the
number of blind people could almost double by 2020.
Yet the World Health Organization says that
in eight out of ten cases, blindness can be cured or avoided.
October ninth was World Sight Day. A campaign
called Vision Twenty-twenty released materials to help governments and
health workers develop national plans to prevent blindness.
Vision Twenty-twenty is a joint effort of the
W-H-O and the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness.
The goal is to end preventable（可预防的）blindness
by 2020. The campaign targets four main causes.
Cataracts（白内障）cause
the lens（晶状体）of the eye to become
cloudy（模糊不清的）. In most of Africa and Asia, cataracts cause at
least half the cases of blindness that can be cured. A simple operation
can remove cataracts.
Trachoma（沙眼）is
an infectious disease spread person-to-person and by insects. Trachoma
causes about fifteen percent of all cases of blindness. Most of the
cases are in Africa. The disease can be treated with antibiotic medicines
and an operation to correct the damage.
The disease known as
river blindness（河忙）is also found mostly in Africa. Flies spread
the infection. A yearly treatment of the drug Mectizan can control the
disease.
Finally, a lack of vitamin A as a result of
poor nutrition is the leading cause of preventable blindness in children.
Vision Twenty-twenty says that every five seconds
another person in the world goes blind. Most blind people live in developing
nations. India has at least nine million. About six million are in China,
and seven million in Africa.
Officials estimate that the world economy loses
about twenty-eight-thousand-million dollars each year from curable blindness.
A resolution passed by the World Health Assembly
in May urges all governments to develop national plans to prevent blindness.
You can learn more about Vision Twenty-twenty on the Internet at v-twenty-twenty
dot o-r-g.
This VOA Special English Development Report
was written by Jill Moss.
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