Agency heartened by visual impairment slowdown

Global prevalence of visual impairment has dropped from 4.58% of the population in 1990 to 3.38% in 2015, a new paper has found.

The paper, published in The Lancet, estimated that there were 36m people who were blind and 217m people with severe or moderate visual impairment. It also estimated that 1.1bn people have near-vision impairment that can be corrected with spectacles.

Other key findings were that 89% of visually impaired people lived in low and middle-income countries, and that 55% of visually impaired people were women.

‘The VLEG global prevalence estimates present a very satisfactory trend,’ said Peter Ackland, CEO of the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB). ‘It is heartening to note that our collective efforts are leading to meaningful change across the world.’