Healthy Vision Month

This May, the ISPB is joining with the National Eye Institute (NEI) to celebrate the first-ever Health Vision Month (HVM). HVM 2003 seeks to educate parents, children and others about children’s and adolescents’ eye health and safety.

Toys and home playground equipment cause more than 11,000 mostly preventable eye injuries in children every year.

Understanding potential dangers and having adult supervision are key to preventing the next injury. The goal of ISPB is to ask parents and caregivers to encourage children to practice eye safety by:

• talking to your child about the dangers of using fireworks
• requiring your child to wear protective goggles when playing high-risk sports like baseball or basketball, using machinery like lawn mowers or working with household chemicals
• not allowing your adolescent to wear contact lenses unless pre-scribed by an eye care professional.

Healthy Vision Month is an educational initiative launched by the National Eye Institute, a part of the National Institutes of Health, an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

For more information, contact the ISPB office.

The Visionary, published as a service of the Illinois Society for the Prevention of Blindness,
is available upon request. The information contained in this issue,
taken from sources considered to be accurate,
does not replace the need for professional eye care consultations and treatments.

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