MANILA, Philippines – World Sight Day (WSD) is an annual day of awareness aimed to focus global attention on blindness and vision impairment. For this year, WSD was held Thursday.
Carrying the campaign, “no more avoidable blindness,” the Global Action Plan (GAP) works together with the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB) for the first time to reduce the number of people suffering from avoidable visual impairment by 25 percent by 2019. This can be achieved by making comprehensive eye care services affordable and accessible .
According to the website of IAPB, South East Asia has one quarter of the world’s population, but as much as one third of the world’s blind people and half of the world’s 1.5 million blind children live in the region.
In the Philippines, a National Statistics Office population report says more than 303,000 people are bilaterally blind. To push further the world campaign for reducing avoidable blindness, Health Secretary Enrique Ona launched the Eye Center in Quirino Memorial Medical Center in Quezon City on Thursday. In addition to that, he also headed the kick off of the Philippine Eye Disease Study, a joint undertaking with the Philippine Eye Research Institute.
