Jim Inhofe: “Vision 2020 World Sight Day 2001 is observed today, Thursday October 11, 2001, in cooperation with the World Health…”

“Vision 2020 World Sight Day 2001 is observed today, Thursday October 11, 2001, in cooperation with the World Health Organization, WHO, the 2020 Foundation of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Christian Blind Mission International, CBMI, and a partnership of 26 international organizations concerned with world blindness working together to eliminate avoidable blindness by the year 2020. Forty-five million people living in our world today are totally blind. Eighty percent of this blindness could be prevented or cured with simple cost-effective nutrition, medicines and medical care. A child in our world goes blind every minute, most often due to a simple lack of Vitamin A. More than half of these precious children will die within 2 years of losing their sight. The primary causes of blindness, malnutrition, disease, lack of medicines and medical care, are always linked to the grinding poverty so characteristic of developing nations around the globe. Millions of men, women and children needlessly live in a prison of darkness 24 hours a day. They desperately need the help of privileged nations to be set free. The Vision 2020 program plans to eliminate most of the world's blindness by the year 2020. But with no intervention, the number of blind in this world will reach an estimated 100 million by the year 2020.”