World Sight Day 2018 messages
World Sight Day (WSD) is an international day of awareness, held annually on the second Thursday of October to focus attention on the global issue of avoidable blindness and visual impairment. The theme of World Sight Day 2018 (WSD18) is Universal Eye Health.
The theme is in keeping with the WHO’s Action Plan 2014-2019 and will be used for the next couple of years as a rolling theme. Each year, however, we will focus on a call to action, and for 2018 it is Eye Care Everywhere.
Key messages
- 36 million people who are blind.
- 217 million people with moderate or severe distance vision impairment.
- Of those with blindness and MSVI, 124 million people have uncorrected refractive errors and 65 million have cataract—more than 75% of all blindness and MSVI is avoidable.
- 253 million people blind or vision impaired (in 2015).
- 1 billion people with near-vision impairment.
- The prevalence of blindness and vision impairment combined has dropped from 4.58% in 1990 to 3.37% in 2015.
- 89% of visually impaired people live in low and middle-income countries.
- 55% of moderate or severely vision impaired people are women.
- Top causes of visual impairment: refractive errors, cataracts, and glaucoma.
- Top causes of blindness: cataracts, glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration.
- The number of people visually impaired from infectious diseases has greatly reduced in the last 20 years
