ARVO 2009 Focuses on Disparities in Eye Health

Newswise — More than 10,000 vision researchers and practitioners will gather May 3-7 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to examine the inequities in eye health across social, cultural and ethnic groups at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology.

The ARVO/Alcon Keynote Session speaker, Hugh R. Taylor, MD, will open the event with his exploration of disparities in eye health around the world: "Washington to Ouagadougou: Who Deserves to See?" Taylor has worked among the world's poorest populations, focusing his research on two causes of world blindness, trachoma and onchocercasias. He is the vice president of the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness that with the World Health Organization jointly runs the global initiative Vision 2020, The Right to Sight, which is focused on eliminating treatable blindness by the year 2020.

In a recent Australian television interview, Taylor said much blindness and many eye diseases such as trachoma, a bacterial infection that causes blindness when the eyelids turn inward, are relatively inexpensive to eliminate from a population, but they compete for health care dollars with other diseases.

"Respiratory infection is important and renal disease is important, diabetes is important -- all these things are important," Taylor said in the interview. "But here is something that we can actually eliminate. We know how to do it. It's achievable. And it's relatively cheap, and that's why it needs to be given the higher priority."

Taylor holds the inaugural Harold Mitchell Chair of Indigenous Eye Health in the Melbourne School of Population Health at the University of Melbourne.

The theme of the ARVO Annual Meeting is "Reducing Disparities in Eye Disease and Treatment," and many lectures will address issues in eye health care across racial, ethnic, gender, age, geographic and socioeconomic groups. Sessions will also consider contributing factors such as lifestyle, culture, language and religious beliefs.

ARVO is the largest eye and vision research organization in the world. Members include more than 12,000 eye and vision researchers from over 73 countries. The Association encourages and assists research, training, publication and dissemination of knowledge in vision and ophthalmology. For more information, visit www.arvo.org.