The Myopia Pandemic: Why Short-sightedness Is Rapidly Increasing Worldwide | ENDEVR Documentary

[Music] from around 2010 onwards a global epidemic was detected that was as destructive as it was unexpected no virus nor bacteria was at the origin of it and yet the threat is more than real [Music] some parts of the world there is a massive epidemic of myopia myob is not just a simple problem of getting glasses this is one of the top causes of liners 83 percent of 20 year olds from Singapore even with the best eye doctors in the world once myopia has been diagnosed it cannot be reversed in perfect vision will never return Asia may be bearing the brunt of the problem but the rest of the world is not far behind it's great it is rising and the decade of birth we're seeing so it is a war that we need to work at across the world scientists are engaged in a Race Against Time what is the cause of this epidemic and more importantly can it be overcome before our children all become near-sighted [Music] we've come to Eastern China where the epicenter of the myopia epidemic is to be found this is wenju population of 10 million 450 kilometers south of Shanghai the situation here is very worrying this is a vast specialist Eye Hospital which treats half a million patients every year there's a huge influx of patients at our Hospital at weekends and school holidays during these peak times there can be more than 2 000 consultations a day most of the patients are children and teenagers who are being checked out for nearsightedness the doctors are all having to work overtime to be able to treat all these children if my ABIA continues to increase at this rate there'll be more and more problems to deal with [Music] the serious nature of the situation has only been recognized recently in 2012 a scientific article published in the Lancet started alarm bells ringing [Music] the author was Ian Morgan an Australian biologist he spent several months a year in China to try and get to the root of the problem so what would you be looking for in these repeated examinations changes in the retina would you use OCT for example we can see that this patient is has the eye eyeball nasal distorted so I think the optic nerve will be restricted the Chinese population is expected to uh Peak at around 1.4 billion and then slowly decline after that on figures that we already have available we can project that something like 1.2 billion of those people will be myopic and of them perhaps 200 to 300 million people will be highly myopic not all of them will be visually impaired or blind but nevertheless dealing with the problem yeah upsell make an Optometric services are going to collapse under the strain countries in Asia are taking the full force of the epidemic between 80 to 90 percent of young people suffer from myopia and there's one thing researchers are now sure of myopia is gaining ground amongst the under-25s everywhere in Europe too doctors are increasingly on the lookout for myopia a research program called I share measures myopia in young people like here for example at the University Hospital of Bordeaux Cecil Del CUO epidemiologist at insem the biomedical French Research Institute helped organize this huge survey sixty thousand young people were examined and the results are worrying do you have any particular disability for example visual hearing or physical yes I have a visual handicap I've been nearsighted for about four or five years the results of our study published last year showed that around nearly half of young people in Europe are now myopic that's to say 47 percent of people aged between 25 and 29 years old at the beginning of the study researchers focused on those illnesses which cause significant visual defects such as glaucoma and cataracts so it's true that we rather ignored myopia and in the long run we were wrong I think we really can talk about an epidemic especially in Asia where the rates of the disease have risen very dramatically here in Europe there's also been a considerable increase and so questions have to be asked about how to counter the phenomenon accomplishment how does Myopia come about thank you the human eye can distinguish shapes and colors thanks to light rays penetrate the cornea and then the pupil then the eyes lens retracts and enables a clear but reversed image to form on the retina at the back of the eye this image is transmitted by the optic nerve to the brain which processes it and restores it the right way up in the case of myopia the following happens the eyeball loses its roundness and lengthens irreversibly having a long eyeball is a deformity which causes myopia and in turn leads to blurry vision when someone who is myopic looks at an object in the distance a sharp image is no longer formed on the retina but in front of it since this part of the eye is further away than normal therefore the image that the retina transmits to the brain is a blurred image [Music] when myopia is severe everything is blurred objects and even faces are difficult to distinguish everyday life is impossible without corrective lenses or glasses and sometimes the condition is so severe that it can lead to acute illnesses or even total blindness [Music] [Music] is the director of one of France's largest eye hospitals the foundation he is very concerned about the rise in cases of severe myopia there's a genuine risk of losing one site because of myopia since the myopic eye is elongated the rapid growth of the surface of the eyeball takes place without the retina being able to grow too the retina is a tissue of a certain shape and if the area that it has to cover increases significantly it can really tear in the same way that any tissue contains there would therefore be a decline in Vision especially if this tissue tears in the central area which is the most important area for eyesight it's the field of vision where we specifically see things in detail in the event of severe myopia the risk of disability is therefore very high the people most affected are found in eastern Asia in particular in Singapore out of 5 million inhabitants 2 million of them suffer from myopia it's an absolute catastrophe Ahmad masliati was born and grew up here like many others suffering from severe myopia her life has always been difficult when I was at primary school I didn't have glasses because my father didn't have the money I had to be right up close to the Blackboard in order to see what was written I sat at a table at the very front but even though my teacher put me there I still couldn't see in the end she just put me right up against the Blackboard but I still couldn't read anything so my doctor has told me to change glasses because these aren't good enough I can't see clearly with them but I won't change them it's fine as long as I can see people and anyway glasses are too expensive so many yeah in all 500 000 people in Singapore suffer from severe myopia that's one in ten of the population [Music] Professor sang me soar is an epidemiologist and has noticed the situation getting worse and worse every year we have adults 40 to 50 years in Singapore of myopia between -10 to -15 and some of them have very extreme myopia if we look at the visual impairment some of them have visually disabling disease and many of them age 40 to 50 are still working so some of their jobs require good Vision it'll be very difficult to be very productive at work if vision is affecting their work and some of them maybe even if they are retired it may affect the activities of daily living [Music] the scientific Community is now starting to take action to combat this threat which hangs over the whole world [Music] to put a stop to the epidemic it was important to work out where to start and what the causes might be the first line of research that the scientists explored was genetics is myopia passed on To Us by our parents is it in our genes Professor Chris Hammond genetic specialist at King's College London heads one of the leading teams in this area in 2010 the team identified for the first time a gene associated with myopia as a result of a study of tens of thousands of people hi Sarah I'm Hello nice to meet you thanks both so much for helping us with our twin research and coming to have your eyes tested with Diana we're very grateful and we've made so many improved advances particularly in short side your short side of both of you and I am too and so the work we've done here with the twins has been really helpful in with our collaborators across the world to try and find out why some of us become short-sighted maybe in the future of work out why we can stop people becoming short-sighted but what we found is one region on the genome on chromosome 15 which is in a gene called Ras grf1 but what it showed is that that Gene is associated with myopia and at the same time our collaborators in the Netherlands found a single Gene too on chromosome 15 as well but just when they thought they [Music] are available for the onset of myopia more than a hundred other genes were subsequently identified as being equally to blame for the geneticists it's impossible to know which ones are the most significant so it's kind of not one gene that causes a family to be myopic I the analogy I give it's like being handed a deck of cards clearly we get half our cards our genes from our parents from one parent and half our genes from the other parent and so clearly if you've got two parents who already have high cards you're much more likely to have high cards and make you more likely to be in my opinion um [Music] genes evolve over thousands of years in humans but this myopia epidemic has only taken a few generations to appear scientists on the wrong track putting the blame on the genetic theory with all the hundreds of genes involved [Music] the heart of the epidemic can be found 15 000 kilometers away in Canton South China [Music] in these Ultra Modern Labs at the center of ophthalmic research geneticists have come to the same conclusion here's a graph showing where myopia occurs in children and their parents on one hand the parents myopia remains more or less at zero which means that they're not myopic but on the other hand we can see that this generation of children have largely negative scores minus five minus ten so there's a trend towards myopia now genes only get modified very slightly from one generation to another so this proves that environmental factors are the cause of this epidemic the latest methods in genetic analysis allow us to confirm that today genes are only responsible for three percent of myopia cases some in the face of these disappointing results researchers wondered whether there wasn't at least a genetic predisposition for myopia in Asian populations their conclusions turned out to be even more surprising and after reconstruction one of the things we did was to compare children of Chinese Origins so we could more or less rule out at least the ethnic aspects of genetic difference who are growing up in Singapore and growing up in Sydney and compare the prevalence of myopia and it was much much higher in Singapore than in Sydney so then we could ask the question well what's the difference in their environmental exposures there's no longer any doubt if the origin of the epidemic is not genetic then we have to be looking at environmental factors researchers turned to looking at our way of life and of course it was intensive reading and working close up that they turned their attention to overall the experts observe that there is a large proportion of myopics among the student and intellectual community who suffer from nearsightedness please raise their hands [Music] through so much reading and observing objects close up our eyes would seem to struggle with distance vision and thus become myopic we already know that our eyesight can be defective very often this is the result of the incorrect hygiene of our vision in the 1960s extensive awareness campaigns were already highlighting the importance of viewing distance for school children a few Simple Rules will help to prevent the deterioration of eyesight look at this pupil bent over his exercise book his posture is abnormal bent over in this way his eyes are only about 20 centimeters from the text that he's written in these conditions his eyes will get extremely tired but in fact well before that in the 19th century ophthalmologist Hermann Cohen wrote about the importance of distance in relation to working and reading in his 1892 work the manual on hygiene For Eyes he suggested changing the layout of classrooms so that children would be forced to stay at the right distance from their work [Music] 120 years later in a Chinese Province several schools have been experimenting with this preventive method thank you and elsewhere in Asia for obvious reasons researchers have been trying to test the hypothesis of viewing distance at school back in Singapore for the last decade the government has been financing a number of studies the aim is to understand the link between working close-up and myopia well there is a lot of let's say distractions indoors itself in this day and age so if you look at it I think there's more tendency for them to stay inside watch television play games uh it's quite common for everyone to wear glasses I'm a little bit concerned because none of my immediate family members like I said actually wear glasses at a very early age so she's a little bit different from the rest I have no idea what's the cost of that probably too much computer or something Reading not in an appropriate environment something like that so the lifestyle of children in Singapore was very different more than 50 years ago compared to now because our economy is growing so our children are reading and writing attaining good grades in school and that's why we see what we call a generational effect in Singapore a very important effect where in young adults who went through this intensive schooling system we think that the schooling system in the young adults and the schooling system that the older adults experience was different and that may be related to near work so more reading and writing as we know causes myopia but intensive schooling system the education system mirrors the increase in real periods in East Asia academic success is the major preoccupation with children spending all their time studying both during and after school the results over a number of years have seen Singapore for example heading the International School league tables in science maths and reading this obligation to succeed has drawbacks myopia is one of the most spectacular of them close-up work in other words reading and now today looking at the screens of smartphones tablets Etc requires the eye to behave differently and work a lot harder in terms of the efforts needed to make accommodations the eye is constantly focusing in order to see properly up close or in the distance this adjustment is called accommodation it takes place naturally in the crystalline lens when an object is close up the lens contracts thickens and adapts this mechanism takes place thousands of times every day foreign [Music] nowadays we attribute myopia to the lengthening of the eyes certain Studies have shown that when people read for a long time or at the moment of reading the eye lengthens although not by much just a few microns for those patients who do not develop myopia this lengthening has disappeared or at least it's only present during the times they read but for those with myopia it's possible that this lengthening really does happen little by little the links between reading studying and the onset of myopia have been shown in statistical research but is this enough to explain the remorseless upsurge in myopia some researchers are more than baffled in Germany Professor Frank scheffel has been working on myopia for 25 years he is world renowned for his revolutionary experiments on young chicks his most surprising invention is a system which enables him to evaluate with Precision the visual abilities of these small birds here we're monitoring the eyesight problems of the chicks this is an infrared refraction picture which allows us to work out if a chick or any other animal is short-sighted long-sighted or has any other problems with their eyes to do this we send an infrared light beam into the eye this beam is reflected and lights up the pupil the software studies the pupil measures the light distribution and can then determine if there's an eyesight problem once the data has been collected the software can tell us how short or long-sighted the chick is this particular one is slightly long-sided but only by one diopter which means that its site is more or less normal yeah one of the most important questions to answer is why reading makes us short-sighted for many years we thought that the eye didn't try to focus as sharply as it could that the accommodation was a bit lazy and that the eye Focus slightly behind the text this means that the image is projected behind the retina we thought that this was the reason why the pupil dilates when one reads but this theory is no longer really accepted nowadays because this lazy accommodation was observed only in those people who were already myopic and not in those where myopia hadn't been diagnosed when reading nothing was happening even if the eye was constantly focusing the image on the retina stayed sharp so why does the pupil continue dilating when we read or look up close at something a phenomenon as yet unknown causes the eye to get bigger the precise link between reading and myopia has still not been established it remains a mystery but it's absolutely vital to solve it by the mid-2000s the medical community all seemed to agree with this conclusion most researchers believe that close-up reading and looking at screens for hours are only part of the answer scientists found themselves down a blind alley critically it was at this point that a bombshell was dropped when an American researcher published a new study Donald mutty is Professor in Optometry at the University of Columbus in Ohio in 1997 he began some highly ambitious research over 10 years he looked into the habits of 4 000 Californian school children from all backgrounds and Origins it was important for us to go out to the school and we got an incredible level of cooperation from the local schools to let us take children out of the school dilate one of their eyes go through all these testing and give them a patch for that eye until the eye stopped being dilated and it became something fun for them which was very satisfying to us that they didn't hate us they didn't run from us they they thought that to come work with us in our in our van it was a really enjoyable interesting thing to do when we started our main goal was to figure out is reading bad for children is near work bad that was the prevailing idea that was the controversy when we started so we constructed a survey to try and evaluate how children were spending their time and a lot of the questions were about reading computer use television watching and almost by accident we decided to add a question well how much time do you spend outside I I hate to think where we be if we didn't decide to add that question [Music] children spent outside Don Muti obtained a spectacular and unexpected result from then on researchers the world over had something new and promising to work on what we were finding was that near work all of these ideas that were bad don't sit so close to the TV don't watch TV don't use that computer so much video games are bad all those ideas about what was causing nearsightedness in myopia didn't come true in our study but this time Outdoors was something that consistently showed a reduced risk more time Outdoors made for a reduced risk for the onset of nearsightedness a second bombshell landed while Don Moody was carrying out his study Australian research carried out by Ian Morgan and his colleague Catherine Rose came up with a similar conclusion the level of Education was indeed important but it wasn't enough it was the time the children spent Outdoors which turned out to be the overriding factor Australia is a remarkable outlier because we have a very highly educated population by World standards well up in the top 10 to 20 countries in the world but we have ridiculously low levels of myopia and when you start thinking about what that might mean one of the ideas we came up with was the idea that maybe it was the very outdoors-oriented lifestyles of Australians that was actually important what we found was the chances that a child would become myopic in our study went from about 60 percent if a child had two mopic parents and spent very little time Outdoors you could still have two myopic parents but if you spent two hours a day each day 14 hours a week your chances of becoming myopic were reduced to about 20 percent so that's a three times reduction in the chances of a child becoming myopic by a simple ordinary natural activity of two hours a day in our study was would be our recommendation for what was really effective that way so this was a decisive turning point in the fight against myopia Don mutty had just identified the first cause of the myopia epidemic the amount of time spent Outdoors it's all down to the early years even if children read a great deal or play for hours on video games the harmful effects on nearsightedness are outweighed by time spent Outdoors [Music] on the face of it it's a simplistic explanation and so the researchers had to go much further to understand exactly why being outdoors helps prevent myopia is it the fresh air the physical exercise or the fact of being able to see longer distances or even being exposed to bright sunlight which is beneficial Professor Frank Sheffield and his small chicks in the tubing and laboratory in Germany were able to get to the bottom of the mystery we had no hypothesis to work on the studies published by Don mooty Catherine Rose and Ian Morgan only showed that children spent more time Outdoors but no one knew why that was helping to reduce myopia so we just wanted to find out if these experiments these tests carried out on children could also be carried out on small chicks so um Frank sheffel was able to go further thanks to his ingenious device for evaluating myopia in chicks so what we have now is a chicken eye again I hope sometimes he decided to fit them with a semi-opaque lens this simple procedure brought about myopia similar to that in humans after several days spent entirely indoors all the chicks fitted with these lenses became short-sighted so then we decided to put other chicks outside on a balcony under an intense light and to observe them we noticed that it took much longer for these chicks to become myopic twice as long in fact Frank sheffel suspected that it was daylight which was slowing down the onset of myopia to prove the theory he decided to bring the chicks back inside and place them under a very strong artificial light hmm so we bought some high intensity lights like those used on film sets and exposed the chicks to fifteen thousand Lux this Luminosity is equivalent to spending a summer's day under a cloudless sky so it's harmless the results were similar it took twice as long for the chicks to become myopic this was a giant breakthrough thanks to Frank Sheffield's tiny chicks exposition to Daylight is what protects our eyesight and inversely being deprived of that light leads to the defamation of the eyes and to myopia once we knew that light was important it became then important to measure what were the sorts of light intensities that would be protective you almost never see light intensities of over a thousand Lux inside a bright day in can be looking at 150 000 to 200 000 Lux the thing we're unsure about is just how high you need to go in order to get protection this hasn't really been properly Quantified in human populations yet we know outside is the trick but it might be ten thousand Lux we need to get two or more it could be a bit lower than that in order to measure the minimum degree of Luminosity necessary to protect the eyes from myopia the researchers redoubled their efforts the quantity of light perceived by our eyes in everyday life can be measured in all sorts of ways the scientists searched for the most precise measures over a period of months in Canton Ian Morgan and his ophthalmologist colleague Wei zhonglan have been trying out a new systems eye growth so that seemed natural so we started off with something like this a simple light meter measuring Lighthouse we're best intense it's a very basic and it's not easy to use in research exactly so that's why we develop this device is because it can very easily attach into the spectacles because it is exactly located in the same angle with your eyes so it can accept it measure the light as soft by your eyes to fully understand the different intensities of brightness to which our eyes are exposed we took part in an experiment with this sensor this small device doesn't just calculate intensity in number of Lux it also detects the light's quality spectrum and wavelengths it was Isaac Newton who discovered that the sun's white light was made up of a mix of six chromatic colors that we can see in rainbows these rays of color behave like waves and the waves are of varying lengths depending on the color and affect the eyes in different ways positively or negatively and so today several studies are focusing on the wavelengths of the color blue blue is more of a predominant wavelength Outdoors compared to indoors and certainly more intense so there are photoreceptors that are sensitive to Blue they're also photoreceptors that are sensitive to red so what we do is we do comparisons between pupil responses to red and pupil responses to Blue all right so just position your head there comfortably and let's see what uh we see here when the colors change if you count to one or two before you blink according to Don witty blue causes a certain natural chemical reaction in the eye which protects us from myopia light stimulates the neuromodulator called dopamine that's what I think we're seeing in these pupil responses pupil is constricting more actively because of this release of dopamine that dopamine release is making everything more sensitive more responsive to Blue more responsive to being outside dopamine is a molecule produced not only in the brain but also in the retina it's the substance that controls the eyes growth when the eye is exposed to a large amount of blue light the retina is stimulated dopamine is released and maintains the pupil's round shape conversely when there is very little light more reddish in color the levels of dopamine decrease causing the eye to elongate [Music] it's been found that dopamine is something that lowers the chances that a child will become myopic so the more time you spend outside the more dopamine you release and the more dopamine you release the more slowing of myopia that you get which is beneficial to the child so dopamine and blue light would seem to explain why there are so many short-sighted people in the world our way of life means that we spend so much more time indoors in particular studying and this interferes with the development of eyesight in childhood and once myopia has set in it's irreversible there's still a mystery out there that more time Outdoors doesn't seem to change how fast a myopia progresses how many prescription changes a child will have so they're still a great challenge all of this time Outdoors stuff is of almost no use to a child once he or she becomes nearsighted the Battleground has now moved elsewhere how to treat myopia once it's diagnosed how to help the millions of short-sighted people around the world once the pupil has become too deformed medicine has few answers [Music] those with myopia are forced to wear glasses or contact lenses for less serious cases surgery is the best Treatment available foreign [Music] will be cured for good and she'll be able to regain normal sight [Music] this line e d f o r very good and now in n d z n f yes good morning good morning I'm Dr gattinel please take a seat thank you okay you can put your coat down there yeah so what brings you here today then my cousin your cousin you operated on him two years ago and he's very very happy with the results so I don't have very severe myopia but I wear glasses all the time which bothers me and I really can't stand contact lenses basically the myopic eye is an eye which is slightly longer than it should be the aim of surgery is not to shorten the eye but to change the curve of the cornea so that light rays which enter the eye Focus squarely on the retina again so we use the laser to make a fine adjustment of the cornea's curve to give it full Optical power and in this way correct or compensate the myopia for one of the most common techniques the procedure takes place in two stages initially a first laser shaves a thin layer of the cornea known as the corneal flap which is then folded back a second laser then works on sculpting the cornea into a predetermined shape according to the characteristics of the patient's eye once the new shape to be imprinted on the cornea has been calculated the laser is programmed so that each impact will remove a predefined amount of the cornea and then just like a sculptor who knows exactly how much plaster or material to remove with each delicate stroke of the Chisel the laser will know how many pulses and where these pulses should be aimed in order to reshape the curve of the cornea [Music] nowadays this is an operation and complications are rare extensive tests are carried out beforehand to check on the patient's Health profile so as to reduce the risks the operation is quick and simple but expensive and is not reimbursed by the Health Service it costs around two to three thousand Euros for both eyes this is the price to pay to be free from glasses and contact lenses forever just eight short seconds is all it takes to get rid of myopia and restore normal sight open wide [Music] all right yes one less case of myopia can you see the clock over there yes I can it's 132. 132 exactly yes great so you can say that as of 1 32 pm today you're no longer short-sighted well exactly I'll see you again in a little while to check on you okay okay so just go and sit in the waiting room and take it easy yet this surgery is not a miracle treatment unfortunately surgery cannot be the Ultimate Weapon against the legions of people we expect to develop myopia in the coming years some people are very afraid of being operated on and that's perhaps a major obstacle for understandable reasons but on a physical level there are limits with the present technology which means that we're not able to correct all types of myopia particularly severe cases we're unable to operate on those patients whose cornea is not thick enough because we cannot intervene and reshape the cornea beautiful what's more the operation is too expensive to be accessible to all many people with myopia would not be able to afford it the ideal solution in fact would be prescribed medicine administered from childhood as soon as myopia is diagnosed which is capable of slowing down the condition or even stopping it this dream could well become a reality in Singapore a new product has been tested by Professor Donald Tan's team about 80 85 percent of all our children are myopic so we felt responsible to the Singapore public we started very early to look at potential treatments to prevent or [ __ ] the progression of myopia and we had been looking at different types of eye drops which could have an effect on eye growth atropine is an old drug in fact it is a cardiac drug which can be made into eye drops and eye doctors were using it to dilate the pupil atropine is derived from Belladonna or deadly nightshade a well-known plant with a notorious reputation nicknamed The Devil's Cherry it became famous during their Renaissance as both a poison and a medicinal plant the word Belladonna originated from Italian named after the beautiful Aristocrats who used the plant as a beauty accessory applying several drops of a mixture based on Belladonna into their eyes made their pupils dilate thus giving them the famous doe-ide seductive look atropine drops are regularly used by ophthalmologists to stop the eye blinking and to dilate the pupil when testing eyesight but today this substance could have a more important role to play [Music] well atropine affects the growth of the eye but how we don't really know yet what we do know is that we can slow down the elongation of the eye myopia is occurs because the eyeball grows too long and we're now able to show that atropine can prevent that elongation by up to about 50 or 60 percent having established this principle The Next Step was to put into practice and perfect the atropine-based treatment in 1999 Donald tan and his colleagues started testing on a large scale on hundreds of school children but they had mixed results this study showed that atropine one percent is extremely effective in controlling my propagation but we realized that whilst atropine is effective it has got some side effects because it can dilate the pupil which means the children may have more glare when they go out in the sun some of them may have some difficulty reading focusing for near so obviously you cannot have children who can't read and therefore we decided to do a second trial in which we went down to 100th the concentration of very very small amount and that was 0.01 and it worked it was fascinating because for the first two years when the children were using the eye drops we realized that the lowest dose which we hadn't expected to work also has almost no side effects and we are treating hundreds and hundreds of children now with our 0.01 atropine which we call myopene so my opinion is this low-dose atropy which we have made myopene would seem to be the first truly effective medicine capable of slowing down myopia once the condition has developed but it's only been fully developed recently and is only authorized in Singapore and Japan at the present time even if promising treatments come on the scene none of them could significantly stem the tidal wave that has hit Asia and soon the rest of the world but some countries are pulling out all the stops they're targeting prevention on a grand scale applicable across the board Taiwan is the first country to have embraced the recent scientific discoveries based around the role of luminosity [Music] we meet up again with Professor Ian Morgan who's been invited to Taiwan this is a Moment of Truth for him he's going to be able to see for himself if his ideas have had any impact in the fight against myopia oh yeah he's been invited by Pei Chan Wu this professor of Ophthalmology has put in place a series of preventive measures inspired by Ian Morgan's work in Taiwan they accepted in Primary School do not do much homework yeah yeah yeah yeah very smarter in the play we were and today was a very end play outside yeah outside [Music] this is with more than two million five hundred thousand inhabitants kyoshung is the second largest city in Taiwan [Music] in this medical school nearly 90 percent of the students are myopic in Taiwan just like elsewhere reducing the percentage of myopia has become an absolute priority the authorities have given Professor Wu carte blanche to make this happen these picture showing that it is going high every year and to the 2010 nothing very successful especially for the myopia yeah then another time I cited the most updated evidence from Professor Morgan showing that outdoor activity is most important so I strongly started have to imprinted the auto activity to the school children Vision Care Program till now is five year then we can see the trend is inversed and then continue to to go down it makes the scientists really happy to see this and so rapidly like we published our paper in 2008 Don mutty published in 2007. within within less than 10 years we're seeing the positive effects come through so that's really fantastic a spectacular change is underway in Taiwan the rate of myopia in school children has been dropping by 10 every year since 2010. Professor Wu has achieved these results through a radical transformation in a number of schools by imposing a minimum of 80 minutes of outdoor recreation a day the double of the average amount in Europe foreign outdoor activities are systematically prioritized in this Pilot School the Natural Science lessons now take place in the school's Garden tablets and digital screens are no longer a threat especially if they're being used Outdoors [Music] classrooms have also been redesigned we spent a great deal of time wondering how to lower the levels of myopia in children it was a question of rethinking the school environment and making sure the classrooms were well enough lit so every year with each new classroom we tested the Luminosity to ensure that the classroom lighting was above 360 looks and that the Blackboard was lit to 500. these were the basic measures right hand right foot Professor Morgan can see the tangible proof of the fruits of the research he started nearly 20 years ago I certainly feel that there's this kind of crusade against myopia that once we knew how we could prevent myopia then it's important to translate that into practical implementation and so you know I've been traveling a lot in order to make sure that this happens and then you get people like Professor Wu who take it up very enthusiastically and make it national policy in Taiwan and we've seen from some of the results that it is really starting to work could the success achieved in Taiwan be transferable to the rest of the world in the last 10 years scientists have been able to prove that Simple Solutions do exist spending time outside going for walks and taking advantage of the sunlight this is basic and free health prevention the fight against myopia is an issue which involves everyone ophthalmologists teachers politicians and parents and for once the solution is easy go outside and get some sun on your face foreign [Music]

Channel: ENDEVR

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Keywords: Free documentary, documentaries, full documentary, hd documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), Business Documentary, high myopia, medical research, myopia treatment, medical research scientist, myopia documentary, myopia research

Id: MBAa97MRGC8

Length: 51min 2sec (3062 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 29 2023