Blindness in Childhood in Developing Countries: Time for a Reassessment?

Our Understanding of Childhood Blindness at the Adoption of VISION 2020 in 1999 Magnitude of Childhood Blindness The global initiative—VISION 2020: The Right to Sight—launched in 1999, targeted blindness in children as one of the five priority areas of disease control [1]. Selecting childhood blindness was based on the fact that blindness in childhood can lead to decades of life spent blind and because the major interventions to control childhood blindness were public health in nature (vitamin A supplementation and measles immunization) for the control of vitamin A-related corneal blindness. Childhood blindness causes significant economic burden on the family and community [2]. At the time, it was estimated that globally there were 1.4 million blind children, twice this number with low vision, and an estimated 500,000 children becoming blind each year [3]. It was anticipated that many of the incident blind would not survive because of vitamin A deficiency, so the annual cumulative annual incidence would be only about 200,000 per year [4].