Rate of blindness highest in Asia

Rate of blindness highest in Asia

JAKARTA: The number of blind people in Indonesia is about three million, or 1.5 percent of the country's population, the highest in Asia and the third highest worldwide, Minister of Health Achmad Sujudi said on Friday.

Speaking to reporters at the commemoration of World Eye Health Day in Jakarta, the minister said that the high rate was caused mainly by poor knowledge on how to prevent blindness.

The high prevalence of blindness is also caused by the limited availability of health services at community health centers and hospitals as well as a lack of eye specialists, Sujudi said.

"About 1.5 million (or 52 percent) of the total number of cases of blind people is caused by cataracts, 402,000 (13.4 percent) by glaucoma and 285,000 (9.5 percent) by eye refraction disorder," he said.

He explained that there were at least 200,000 new cataract patients annually in Indonesia, while the number of eye specialists reached only 400, who were capable of performing only 50,000 cataract operations per annum. -- JP