Some New Discoveries and News in Vision

Doctors are suggested to take special care when prescribing fluoroquinolones to patients over 60. As a class of antibiotics used for bronchitis, pneumonia, sinusitis and certain skin infections, fluoroquinolones have been reported to be associated with double vision by investigators at Casey Eye Institute. This double vision may be caused by tendinitis in muscles around the eyes.

A study in Journal of the American Medical Association in this September evaluated the mortality rates of Ethiopian children. Some of them receive antibiotic azithromycin to control infectious eye disease trachoma and the others do not receive the eye disease treatment. The study found that the treatment of eye disease using antibiotics can significantly lower death rate among children in Ethiopia. In fact, infectious diseases have been the leading cause of death in the country. Azithromycin is proved to effectively fight against bacteria.

Medical student Grant Moore funded a nonprofit organization named Working Vision, which was inspired by his intern experience in Nepal in 2008. He realized that some developing countries had no government-mandated occupational safety standards including safety eyewear. As a result, eye injuries are common among workers. Working Vision is now aimed to reduce work-related eye injuries in those developing nations such as Nepal, Bangladesh, Vietnam, South Africa and Kenya. Currently, the charity organization is launching donations of new and lightly used safety eyeglasses, which will be distributed to workers in those countries.

In January 2009, Mark Changizi released his new book, the Vision Revolution. The neuroscientist and vision expert explains how the human eye works. The book points out that the latest research has overturned everything we thought and we knew about human vision. For non-experts and experts alike, they can get new notion of superpowers of human vision, such as telepathy and X-ray vision. The book also explains why humans see in color, why human eyes face forward unlike other animals’ eyes, why people see illusions as well as other insightful visual questions.