World Sight Day 2018 messages
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