Half the world's population will be short-sighted by 2050

 18-Feb-16, Science Alert 

If current trends continue, half the world’s population (almost 5 billion) will be short-sighted in just over three decades, with one-fifth of those expected to have a significantly increased risk of blindness, a new study reports.

Image: Nomad_Soul / Shutterstock.com

That’s a seven-fold increase in short-sightedness (or myopia) from 2000 to 2050, and despite the condition becoming so rapidly prevalent, scientists still can’t agree on what’s causing it. It would be easy to link our obsession with computer and phone screens to the so-called myopia epidemic, but if only things were that simple.

Between the 1970s to the early 2000s, cases of myopia almost doubled in the US, and in certain parts of Asia, the rise has been even more dramatic, with a recent survey finding that as many as 96 percent of teenagers in South Korea are short-sighted. In Singapore, China, and Japan the rate amount teens is around 80-90 percent.

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