On this year’s World Sight Day, which is designated to be on the second Thursday of every October, Orbis advocated the importance of eye health and explained “The Silent Thief of Sight” – glaucoma, Orbis Macau Executive Committee Chairperson Isabel da Silva said on Thursday.
Silva made the remarks during yesterday’s launch ceremony of Orbis Macau’s Action for Sight Campaign 2020 and the first Action for Sight Exhibition at the Macao Science Centre in Nape, which is on for a month.
Silva said that this year’s theme is titled “Window of Hope”, which is an analogy to highlight that every single donor and supporter are the windows of hope for the millions of visually impaired people around the world and to encourage the community to join Orbis and open more windows of hope for sight.
During the ceremony, Kiang Wu Hospital’s ophthalmology department representative Dr Hong Sin U said that glaucoma is known as the “silent thief of sight” because its symptoms are not obvious and many people tend to overlook them until it reaches a more advanced stage. She stressed that regular eye examinations can often help control and manage glaucoma.
According to an Orbis statement that was given out during Thursday’s launch ceremony, the charity has been a pioneer in the prevention and treatment of avoidable blindness for nearly four decades. The statement pointed out that Orbis operates the world’s only Flying Eye Hospital, which has a fully accredited ophthalmic teaching hospital on board a MD-10 aircraft, and Cybersight, which is an award-winning telemedicine platform
(The Macau Post Daily/Macau News)
PHOTO © The Macau Post Daily/Prisca Tang
