Arab Gulf Program for United Nations Development Organizations (AGFUND), chaired by Prince Talal Bin Abdulaziz, allocated its tenth annual 2008 prize for combating visual disability. The prize allocation is synchronized with the warnings made by the World Health Organization (WHO) about increased causative factors of blindness in the world and in the East Mediterranean region where 90% of the blind live in poor states. WHO estimates blindness cases by 50 millions and visual disabilities by 180 millions with expected increase in this number to 75 millions by 2020 if eye diseases and their causes were not combated. WHO announced that six million people in the East Mediterranean region in average suffer from blindness while there are other 22 million people suffer from visual disability. The latest statistics of the WHO have revealed that there is one child becomes blind at the world level every minute while every 5 minutes one adult becomes blind. --More
