Causes of blindness
When you think about it, the very act of actually seeing the world around us is an astonishing thing. It relies on the interaction between the brain and the eyeball, two extraordinarily complex organs, so it's hardly surprising that there are so many ways in which we can suffer sight loss.
Here are some of the major causes of blindness, and the ways in which Sightsavers is tackling them.
Cataract
Cataract is the world’s leading cause of blindness, with around 18 million people blind as a result.
River blindness
As its name suggests, river blindness affects people living by fast flowing rivers. Its official name is onchocerciasis; river blindness is actually a phrase coined by our founder the late Sir John Wilson when he travelled to West Africa in the 1950s.
Trachoma
Trachoma is a potentially blinding eye infection, which has been eliminated in most developed countries. It is the world's leading cause of preventable blindness, and tends to affect the poorest communities in the developing world.
Neglected tropical diseases
Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) are a group of 17 parasitic and bacterial infections that affect over one billion of the world’s poorest people.
Childhood blindness
An estimated 19 million children have a visual impairment, and of these, 1.4 million are blind.
Diabetic retinopathy
Diabetic retinopathy affects 1.8 million people globally. It is caused by damage to the small blood vessels in the retina at the back of the eye as a result of diabetes.
Refractive error
Refractive error refers to the collection of sight problems that require glasses to correct them: short and farsightedness and astigmatism.
Glaucoma
Glaucoma is common in both developed and developing countries, and it is estimated that 4.5 million have become blind from it.
Low vision
Low vision is when, even after interventions like glasses, people have difficulty distinguishing objects and/or distances.
