Most people take them for granted. They are there to make us discover the world day after day and few realize the immense value they have as long as something disturbs the visual functionality. And then we remember our eyes. Precisely for this reason the slogan of the World Sight Day, promoted by the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (Iapb), is #Love your eyes and aims to raise awareness of public opinion but also institutional authorities and doctors, on the importance of prevention and eye care by ensuring that “everyone counts”, that is, without forgetting those who do not have the opportunity to undergo medical examinations. Many international and national initiatives with expert advice on how to protect the eyes at all ages.
World Sight Day 2021
A photo contest and free visits, initiatives for the World Day
Three million people with vision problems
The eye weighs 0.27 percent of the body, but receives more than 80 percent of the information that comes to us from the outside. Sight is a precious gift that can be threatened by many diseases and unhealthy lifestyles. Sight-threatening diseases, in fact, affect over three million people in Italy and many more are at risk because glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy and maculopathy grow with age and chronic diseases. Most vision-threatening diseases are asymptomatic in the early stages – meaning they damage nerve cells silently. For example, about 50 percent of over 1.2 million patients with glaucoma do not know they have it.
#Amaituoiocchi to continue seeing the world
by Irma D’Aria
400 thousand fewer interventions in Italy
In our country, eye diseases are on the rise and the pandemic has greatly slowed down checkups. “The risk of diseases that cause blindness grows due to a convergence of factors: the aging of the population, the decrease in the possibility of accessing public eye services, the lack of a rooted prevention culture that is able to promote periodic visits to Ophthalmologists” he declares Mario Barbuto, president of Iapb Italia Onlus and of the Italian Union of the Blind and Visually Impaired. To these long-existing conditions, we must also add the negative effect of the pandemic which reduced the number of specialist checks by a third in 2020 with about 400,000 fewer interventions. “For this – continues Barbuto – it is necessary to reactivate public investments in eye care and raise awareness of institutions and citizens on the absolute necessity of periodic visits according to the calendar proposed by the Italian Ophthalmological Society: at birth, within 3 years, at 12 years, once every 2 years for people over 40 and once a year for people over 60 “.
How to love your eyes: the 4 P rule
The role of visual rehabilitation
When the diagnosis is late and neither surgery nor drugs can save sight in its entirety anymore, the way of visual and functional rehabilitation remains open, which allows visually impaired people to regain large spaces of autonomy and freedom. An area in which telemedicine has shown its great usefulness, as evidenced by the use with great success by the visually impaired patients of the National Low Vision Pole of Iapb Italia – WHO Collaborating Center at Gemelli in Rome – of tele-rehabilitation software visual Eye-fitness that allowed to carry out rehabilitation exercises from home, whose data are transmitted in real time to the center, overcoming the difficulty of accessing the facility due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
From prevention to diabetic retinopathy, teleophthalmology improves treatments
The ‘Vista in salute’ campaign
Just to try to reverse the course and promote prevention, Iapb Italia is involved in the Italian territory in the campaign of free eye examinations ‘Vista in Salute’: a truck equipped with high-tech mobile eye clinics reaches the squares of the main cities in recent weeks. Italians, offering free ophthalmological checks to over forties. An initiative that offers citizens an additional opportunity for diagnosis, aims to develop the culture of prevention and wants to stimulate the health authorities of the Regions to activate new diagnostic paths fed by adequate public resources, also making use of new technologies and above all allowing to identify the onset of the disease already in the initial stage.
The next stages of the truck
‘Vista in salute’ is an itinerant project, funded by the Italian Parliament with the 2019 Budget Law, which provides for the stay in the squares of the main cities of the Regions, from 10 to 18, of a large mobile outpatient facility – a hi-tech truck – equipped with several stations, where it will be possible to carry out high-tech eye checks on the retina and optic nerve free of charge, reserved for people over 40 years of age, with green pass or tampon within the previous 48 hours. It will thus be possible to collect data which will then be used to start the constitution of a national database, aimed at knowing the impact of pathologies and indispensable for the development of public health policies for visual protection. These are the stages in the Lazio Region: Rome 14,15,16, 17 – Via dei Fori Imperiali corner Via di San Pietro in Carcere; Latina 18 and 19 October – Piazza del Popolo; Frosinone 20 and 21 October – Piazza Falcone and Borsellino. For more info,
www.vistainsalute.it.
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