Top Ten Facts On Blindness

What is Blindness / Vision Impairment?

Loss of vision that cannot be corrected with glasses or contact lenses is termed as blindness. Causes of this vision loss may include accidents or injuries, diabetes, glaucoma, and macular degeneration (1^✔ ✔Trusted Source
Blindness and vision loss

Go to source).

Types of blindness are partial blindness, complete blindness, congenital blindness, Legal blindness, and nutritional blindness. The symptoms are blurred vision, eye pain, floaters, sensitivity to light, and sudden loss of vision (2^✔ ✔Trusted Source
Blindness

Go to source).

Top Ten Facts on Blindness

Statistics on Blindness

1. Globally, every five seconds, a person goes blind (3^✔ ✔Trusted Source
   World Sight Day
   
   Go to source).
2. Around 89% of the visually impaired people live in developing countries. (4^✔ ✔Trusted Source
   The Burden of Visual Impairment and Efforts to Curve it Down
   
   Go to source)
3. According to the National Health Policy document of the Government of India, 1983, “One of the basic human rights is the right to see” (5^✔ ✔Trusted Source
   Free Ophthalmic Hospitals' Society
   
   Go to source).
4. Despite this lofty aim, India’s blind population totals a whopping 118 million in 2020 (6^✔ ✔Trusted Source
   Estimation of blindness in India from 2000 through 2020: implications for the blindness control policy
   
   Go to source).
5. Globally, approximately 2.2 billion people have near or distant vision impairment (7^✔ ✔Trusted Source
   Blindness and vision impairment
   
   Go to source).
6. Cataract, the leading cause of visual disability, accounts for 66.2 percent of blindness in the country (8^✔ ✔Trusted Source
   10 little-known facts about blindness
   
   Go to source).
7. Nearly 2-8 % of visually impaired people use a cane to navigate. The rest use guide dogs or nothing at all (9^✔ ✔Trusted Source
   Blindness Statistics
   
   Go to source).

Advertisement

Causes of Blindness

8. A largely undocumented cause of blindness in India is diabetic retinopathy, especially in the working middle-class. The extent of the problem, which can be prevented with good glycemic control, is yet to be estimated (10^✔ ✔Trusted Source
   Diabetic care initiatives to prevent blindness from diabetic retinopathy in India
   
   Go to source).

Control of Blindness

9. The National Programme for Control of Blindness, launched in 1976, aims to reduce the overall blindness prevalence rate from 1.4% to 0.3% by the year 2020 (11^✔ ✔Trusted Source
   National Programme for Control of Blindness
   
   Go to source).
10. The program focuses on controlling avoidable blindness; providing high-quality eye care to affected persons, especially the rural poor; increasing the number of cataract operations, and reduction in the backlog by screening all populations over 50 years.