VISION 2020: The Right to Sight: a global initiative to eliminate avoidable blindness.

A n estimated 45 million people around the world are blind. 1 Most of them have lost their sight to diseases that are treatable or preventable. Eighty percent of them live in the lesser-developed world in countries where chronic economic deprivation is exacerbated by the added challenge of failing vision. Without intervention, the number of individuals with blindness might reach 76 million by 2020 because of a number of factors, primarily the rapid aging of populations in most countries. Since eye disease is seen largely in older people, the projected doubling of the world’s population older than 50 years to 2 billion by 2020 has profound effects on the number of those with blindness and low vision.