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India has come up with a new definition of blindness, in line with WHO criteria, a step that would drastically bring down the number of people considered "blind" in the country.

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Redefining the criteria after over four decades, the new definition says a person who is unable to count fingers from a distance of three metres would be considered "blind" as against the earlier stipulation of six metres.

The definition has been revised the first time after 1976 with the objective of generating data which can be compared with global estimates and achieve the WHO goal of reducing the blindness prevalence of India to 0.3% of the total population by 2020.

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The notification in this regard has been issued by the health ministry.

Going by the new definition, the population of blind people in India will reduce from 1.20 crore (as per National Blindness survey 2007 data) to 80 lakh.

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Further, India has to achieve the goal set by WHO which recommends reducing the prevalence of blindness to 0.3% by 2020 to achieve the elimination of avoidable blindness.

The previous definition of blindness was adopted at the time of the inception of the National Programme for Control of Blindness (NPCB) in 1976.

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Read more:
New Definition Of 'Blindness' Will Bring Down Number Of Blind In The Country By 40 Lakh - Indiatimes.com

This entry was posted on April 23, 2017 at 11:46 pm and is filed under Blindness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |