Letters | On World Sight Day, let’s open our eyes to preventable blindness
- Improving eye-care services and access should be part of the pandemic recovery as it can help end the avoidable blindness endemic in poorer countries and improve social goals from education to easing poverty
It is not yet possible to see the end of the Covid-19 pandemic or to estimate its impact on global poverty. But sight restoration, while generating less attention, is an effective way to ease poverty around the world.
An estimated 1.1 billion people live with vision impairment primarily because they have no access to eye-care services. About 90 per cent of the people affected live in low- and middle-income countries.
In July, the United Nations General Assembly adopted its first resolution on eye health after the championing of the UN Friends of Vision, a group of country representatives committed to elevating the issue. It means that countries are committed to ensuring the availability and accessibility of high-quality eye-health services to people living with preventable, treatable or manageable eye-health conditions.
Eye health is so intricately linked with who we are and how we interact with the world. It’s important to ensure that eye health is explicitly part of the broader development agenda as well as strengthened within the health system.