Excerpted from Irma Arkus' blog, October 8, 2009, see full text at (scroll down to the Oct. 8 entry):
http://open.salon.com/blog/irma_arkus [1]
Seva Canada, Myself and World Sight Day: GENDER & BLINDNESS
Today is Oct 8th, World Sight Day, and this year, unlike those before it, a little known fact caught my attention: of all the blind people in the world 2 out of 3 are girls and women. Trust me. I understand that the world is exceptionally cruel to its womenfolk. They tell me that reasons for this substantial disparity are numerous: political, economic, cultural, financial, poverty-driven.But they can also be summarized as easily as saying that girls and women receive only half the access to eye care that men do.
But the crux of the matter is far worse than that: most of these girls and women should not be blind. In fact 80% of these cases of blindness are either entirely preventable, or entirely reversible. We can literally heal the blind and help some 30 million girls and women ( . . . )
Today is World Sight Day. 30 million women are blind and the world is not blinking in agony.
I have had the rare opportunity to work with Seva Canada for the past few months, and the experience has been enriching, to say the least. I've been managing the gender and blindness awareness campaign, Her Sight, myself a stranger to the subject of blindness. There are a very few, very rare organizations that have such a profound influence on human lives, and I was lucky enough, albeit briefly, to experience belonging to one.
Not only do they fund eye camps, but also organize sustainable eye care facilities, and training for local medical staff. Their efforts in India, for example, have resulted in an estimated 20% reduction of blindness cases across India as a whole ( . . . )
(Note: the Seva Canada website is at: http://www.seva.ca/default.htm [2] )
Links:
[1] http://open.salon.com/blog/irma_arkus
[2] http://www.seva.ca/default.htm
[3] http://rabble.ca/print/babble/body-and-soul/gender-and-blindness-2-out-3-worlds-blind-are-girls-and-women#comment-1074394
[4] http://rabble.ca/user
[5] http://rabble.ca/user/register
I actually didn't know that martin. Thanks.
Cuban doctors have been doing a lot of work on cataract operations and other procedures to reverse or alleviate blindness or severe vision loss.
I was involved in a project to eradicate trachoma in Mauritania and southern Morrocco. This mostly affected poor rural people, but I don't remember any gender-based statistics.