With AIDS, malaria and other diseases costing millions of lives every year, worrying about the vision of people in the developing world may seem like an indulgence.
But supplying glasses for the world’s poor may be one of the most valuable investments around. Hundreds of millions of people — some put the estimates as high as 2 billion — do not have the corrective lenses that would allow them to lead better, more productive lives.
A study published in a WHO journal in June estimated the cost in lost output at US$269 billion a year. Moreover, tackling vision problems early can help prevent later blindness.
Now efforts are under way to find a means of distributing inexpensive glasses on a wide scale. One promising technology is self-adjustable spectacles, which let untrained wearers set the right focus themselves in less than a minute, greatly reducing the need for trained optometrists, who are rarely available in Africa and many parts of Asia. Though these adjustable glasses cannot yet help with conditions like astigmatism, about 90 percent of refractive errors can be fixed.
At least three organizations are now offering their own versions of low-cost adjustable spectacles. Two are relatively new groups based in the Netherlands that have received little international recognition. The third, based in England and championing a British invention called AdSpecs, has been attracting widespread media attention for more than a decade.
AdSpecs, which allow the corrective power of the glasses to be adjusted by means of a clear fluid injected into the lenses, were developed by Joshua Silver, a physics professor at Oxford University who has retired and now directs a research institute there called the Center for Vision in the Developing World. Since introducing the glasses in 1996, Silver has set an ambitious goal of distributing a billion pairs of low-cost adjustable glasses by the year 2020.
In the intervening 13 years, though, only about 30,000 AdSpecs have been distributed; they cost about US$19 a pair.
One of the Dutch groups, the Focus on Vision Foundation, says it can produce its Focusspec glasses for about US$4 a pair. The group’s founders say the price will drop substantially once the glasses are being made in large volume. They plan to distribute about 30,000 pairs early this year, initially in Afghanistan, Ghana and Tanzania.
The other Dutch offering, called U-Specs (universal spectacles), is being promoted by the VU University Medical Center and a charity called the DOB Foundation.
Both Dutch models are based on a design pioneered in the 1960s by Luis Alvarez, an American who won a Nobel Prize in physics. The design uses two lenses that slide across each other to alter their focus. U-Specs were initially developed in 2003 by Rob van der Heijde, a physicist at the VU University Amsterdam.
Frederik van Asbeck, a former student of van der Heijde, struck out on his own to develop the Focusspec in 2005. Though the Dutch camps have had sporadic contact, they are not working together.
The tangled provenance of the designs demonstrates the unspoken yet occasionally palpable sense of rivalry among the various camps.
“I view them as good friends,” Silver, the AdSpecs inventor, said. “We’re not competitors. I’m just rather keen on origins and facts being clearly stated.”
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