World Sight Day - How far have we come?

WORLD Sight Day (WSD) is an annual event focusing on the problem of global blindness. Held on the second Thursday of October each year, the event aims at raising public awareness round the world about the prevention and treatment of loss of vision and low vision.
Ghana will join the rest of the world to celebrate the event which falls on October 14, this year on a global theme: Countdown to 2020 and with a local sub-theme: Countdown to 2020 -How Far Have We Come? The venue for the celebration is Wa, the capital of the Upper West Region.
Activities planned for the occasion in Ghana are interaction with the media, radio and television programmes, press releases, regional screening and mini-launches, as well as cataract surgeries to be performed in the Eastern and Upper West regions.
Included on the official World Health Organisation (WHO) calendar, WSD is co-ordinated by International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB) under the Vision 2020 Global Initiative. The theme, and certain core materials are generated by the (IAPB).
On World Sight Day, Vision 2020 members work together to: Raise public awareness on blindness and vision impairment as a major international public health issue, as well as influence governments or ministers of health to participate in and designate funds for national blindness prevention programmes. The day is also used to educate target audiences about blindness prevention, Vision 2020 and to generate support for Vision 2020 programme and activities.
As part of activities commemorating this year’s event, the Ghana Health Service (GHS) on Thursday organised a seminar for a section of the media to sensitise them on issues of the eye and how it could be protected from impairment.
Information made available at the seminar indicated that approximately 314 million people world-wide live with low vision and blindness. Of these, 45 million people are blind and 269 million have low vision, 145 million people have low vision due to uncorrected refractive errors (nearsightedness, far-sightedness or astigmatism). In most of these cases, normal vision could be restored with eyeglasses.
Women are said to face a significantly greater risk of vision loss than men: Two-thirds of blind people world-wide are women and girls.
Addressing the participants, the Head of the Eye Unit of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), Dr Oscar Debrah, said in Ghana an estimated 220 people were blind.
He named the major causes of blindness and low vision in Ghana as cataract reactive errors which accounted for 50 per cent of the problem; trachoma, vitamin A deficiency, onchocerciasis 15 per cent; glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, sickle cell retinopathy 20 per cent and other causes, 15 per cent.
He said Ghana was having problems with eye care because of lack of human resource and infrastructure adding that there were only 54 eye specialists in the country with majority of them working in Accra and Kumasi.
He, therefore, advised people, especially those who were 40 and above, to go for eye test at least once each year to prevent the incidence of cataract and glaucoma which were age-related.
He explained that last year for example, only 14,000 cataract operations were carried out instead of about 46,000 cases which needed attention.
Available information on blindness indicate that cataract is considered to be the cause of blindness globally, accounting for between 40 to 50 per cent of all blindness adding that the single most important risk factor was age which explained why almost all people over the age of 70 years had some degree of cataract.
“However, cataract surgery is one of the cost effective healthcare intervention”, it pointed out.
It stated that 90 per cent of blind people lived in low-income countries yet 80 per cent of blindness was avoidable which means they were readily treatable and/or preventable. “Without effective, major intervention, the number of blind people world-wide has been projected to increase to 76 million by 2020”, it said.

*The use of eyeglasses could help restore normal vision to eliminate avaidable blindness.