The greater part of eye diseases can generally be treated or prevented. However, in developing countries, where there are no adequate health facilities, they can seriously jeopardize the visual function. According to WHO's data, 85% of the blindness cases in the world could be preventable with adequate health interventions: it is said that cataracts, the main cause of blindness in poorer countries, could be successfully operated on at the cost of 25 Euro! AMOA (an association of eye specialists for Africa) is one of the organizations working daily to improve the quality of life of thousands of people in various regions of Africa focusing on the development of local resources and the strengthening of hospitals and institutions for the blind.
In Senegal, for example, as explains Dr. Gianluca Laffi, AMOA's President, there exist public hospitals where emergency assistance interventions take place, however it is then up to patients to personally find medications and surgical material. Next to this, it is possible to find private facilities (two of them
supervised directly by AMOA), but patients are asked to provide a ticket for the interventions. The availability of equipment and material to consumers remains nevertheless the main obstacle. It seems superfluous to underline the necessity and the importance for adequate plans of visual prevention. It is enough to think that the second cause of visual impairment for 18% of the population of this country is based on refraction problems that are not taken care of (myopia, hypermetropia, astigmatism) while the main cause of blindness for 40% of the population is untreated cataracts. Data relating to untreated refraction problems clash enormously when comparing them with the statistics of industrialized countries where, according to ISTAT, over 41%
