World Sight Day (WSD), held every second Thursday of October, is an annual day of awareness focusing global attention on blindness and vision impairment. Running in its fifth year of the WHO Global Action Plan, The International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB) encourages participants to continue with its rolling theme on Universal Eye Health, WHO’s Global Action Plan of 2014-19. The plan supports the provision of effective and accessible eye care services for effectively controlling visual impairment including blindness.
This year’s WSD call to action is “Make Vision Count”, encouraging awareness of eye care issues that impact lives everywhere, both developed and developing economies. Among the campaign’s key messages include working together for the elimination of avoidable blindness, investing in eye health, increasing budget allocations to address need, addressing human resources crisis in eye health, investing in training, innovation and research, integrating eye health at every level of the health system, and withdrawing user fees to the poorest.
80% or 4 out of 5 of the world’s blind are avoidably so and about 285 million people are visually impaired worldwide. Preventable causes are as high as 80% of the total global visual impairment burden, whereas 90% of the world’s visually impaired people live in developing countries. The IAPB Vision Atlas website is a compilation of the very latest data and evidence related to avoidable blindness and vision impairment. On World Sight Day 2017, the Atlas will have updated prevalence maps with data for every country from 1990 to 2015, with projections to 2020. It will also host additional maps for the 21 GBD Regions showing causes and the numbers affected by Near-Vision Loss.
WSD is co-ordinated by IAPB under the VISION 2020 Global Initiative. The theme and certain core materials are generated by IAPB. All events are organised independently by members and supporter organisations. #MakeVisionCount
Source: IAPB
