专家敦促将视力放在全球健康的重点中

视力，生活质量，经济和发展都是如此相互联系，应将眼睛健康重新塑造为可持续发展议程的主流部分。

来自25个国家的73位领先专家的报告警告说，没有在全球眼中进行额外投资健康, 1.8 billion people may be living with vision impairment by 2050. Right now, there are deep inequalities both between and within countries, it says.

Matthew Burton, who led the Lancet Global Health Commission, said: “About 90 per cent – nine out of ten – of the 1.1 billion people globally who are living with vision impairment live in low- and middle-income countries. If you look at absolute numbers, they’re mostly in South Asia, East Asia and South-East Asia.”

“If a child can’t read the blackboard, they’re going to be held back in their learning and their ability to engage in school, and that has an enormous effect on their life trajectory in terms of their ability to progress in education and in employment and beyond,”

Matthew Burton, director, International Centre for Eye Health

该委员会发现，西撒哈拉以南非洲的影响也不成比例地受到影响，其失明率是2020年北美的九倍。

眼保健工作者的短缺被确定为发展中国家护理的主要障碍，在撒哈拉以南非洲地区，每100万人口一名眼科医生，而高收入国家的平均每百万人口平均每百万。

“不平等的口袋”

伦敦卫生与热带地区伦敦国际眼保健中心主任伯顿补充说：“当您在低收入国家和中等收入国家中，疾病负担也有很大的差异。”药品。

“例如，在斯里兰卡和尼日利亚，近一半的白内障集中在一个非常特殊的群体中：居住在丧偶的农村地区的妇女。”

委员会的证据表明，视力受损不成比例地影响妇女，农村人口和少数民族群体。全世界每100名患有失明或中度至严重视力丧失的男性，估计有108和112名女性受影响。

该委员会的另一位作者认为，尼日利亚卡拉巴尔大学的汉娜·法尔（Hannah Faal）认为，通过分类数据来识别这些“不平等的口袋”至关重要。

“We’ve got to disaggregate data by person, by location and by circumstance, and that’s got to be built into the ongoing information collection systems of all countries,” she said.

The Commission found that enhancing eye health could help to achieve a range of the UN’s可持续发展目标, by contributing to improvements in性别平等，education，就业前景，工作生产率，家庭收入和经济生产力。

“What the Commission seeks to do is to slightly reframe the discourse of eye health as being not just a health issue, but actually something that speaks to many areas of sustainable development, many areas of life in general,” said Burton.

“Eye health clearly is a health and wellbeing issue, and we have mapped evidence on how it can affect quite different areas of health,” he said, citing the example of how dementia can be compounded by impaired vision, as well as links between severe vision impairment and risk of mortality.

伯顿补充说：“除此之外，您可以清楚地想象眼睛健康的重要性在生活的许多其他方面。”“If a child can’t read the blackboard, they’re going to be held back in their learning and their ability to engage in school, and that has an enormous effect on their life trajectory in terms of their ability to progress in education and in employment and beyond.”

Economic benefits

该报告提出了一系列建议governments使用电话,包括改善眼部护理emedicine, mobile health, and artificial intelligence. It highlights Kenya where teachers are using smartphones to diagnose and refer pupils with vision loss.

这项研究基于去年世界卫生组织（WHO）的2019年世界愿景*报告，并进一步分析了良好的眼睛健康的经济利益。作者估计，应对可预防的视力损失可能每年带来4110亿美元的全球经济利益。

The Commission urges governments to include eye health in broader healthcare planning and financing.

“One of the problems we’ve had with eye health over the decades has been it’s often sat outside the mainstream of the health system,” said Burton. “The big nudge from the WHO in 2019, which the Commission is taking forward, is the argument that eye care really needs to be a part of universal health coverage. We think if that becomes a reality, many things will begin to improve, as activities are focused on reaching the people who are least well served.”

WHO的感官功能，残疾和康复部门的负责人Alarcos Cieza说：“如果我们解决眼疾病和视力障碍，那么所有与可持续发展目标的联系都以一种更自动的方式发生 - 在教育中发生的所有更广泛的影响在劳动中，减少道路交通事故等。……因此，学校里的孩子和工作人员可以发挥全部潜力，而我们的老龄化人口可以很好地老化。”

* This article was corrected on February 19, 2021, to clarify that the Lancet Global Health report builds on the WHO’s 2019 World Report on Vision, not the VISION 2020 report as previously stated.