A message from Eye Care Foundation CEO Björn Stenvers:
(ECF) After screening over 50,000 children in Vietnam we face many challenges. Some provinces we concluded an increase of +1 on the majority of young children due to fulltime school work on telephone screens during Lockdown. In Viet Nam, there is an estimated 14 million people with vision loss. Of these, 520,000 people were blind.
With the support of partner US-AID our publication ‘a day in the life of Hy&Ry’ (on how to treat your eyes) could be provided to thousands of school children.
Of all the countries (Pop. 250 mio) where we have programs, 36 mio people have vision loss (around 58% is female) of which 1.2 mio is blind.
Globally, at least 450 million children have a sight condition that needs treatment, with 90 million children living with some form of sight loss. (448 million children have refractive errors and 90 million children live with sight loss)
During last days on an international conference on Children in The Carpet Museum in Baku (Azerbijan) we learned that around 30-50% of the visitors of local museums worldwide are children. Now that the 104,000 museums worldwide are opening up again after Pandamic, many school programs involve health topics among which Eye Care & Prevention (UNESCO).