The goal of the VISION2020 initiative is to eliminate avoidable blindness by the year 2020.¹ The estimated prevalence of blindness and visual impairment in 2002 was lower than previously predicted (37 million instead of 52 million), suggesting that the three components of VISION2020 – disease control, human resource development and infrastructure development, have successfully helped millions of people escape visual impairment or blindness.² However, the WHO point out that with an ageing population in many countries, the risk of visual impairment increases and therefore these early successes need to be developed and expanded to meet this challenge.

At the other end of the age range, an example of concrete progress in this worldwide effort is provided by Muhit et al. (see page 995 and page 1000) in this month’s BJO. The authors describe a method to add to the existing techniques to ascertain blind children in a developing country. Whereas many valuable studies have used …