Your news item which focused on the high incidence of visual defects in children calls for an indepth study of the problem, to identify the causative factors. The promoting factors are many and varied.

Firstly there is the snag about excess TV watching. There are kids who on a regular basis watch TV three to four hours a day, if the morning pre school cartoon session is also taken into account. Since such long sessions cannot be sustained in a seated posture, they recline on a settee, to watch from a reclining position. This is an unusual viewing angle which definitely invites eye strain. Apart from the TV there are other problems caused by near view of computers and hand held video games. All these add up to eye stress.

When at their books, there is the uncorrected wrong stance in writing. Very often there isn’t an interval of even four inches between the eye and the book. As one parent succinctly put it, he felt that his son could write with his nose! This is a fault that could well be rectified in school. In the good old days, our teachers-bless them-they corrected our writing posture with a resounding thump on the stooping spine. When I mentioned this to a teacher, she said that she dared not try it, as the parents will first go to the police before they complain to the Principal. Well, times have changed. It is not unusual for school children to seek relief from the inevitable headaches with daily intake of Paracetamol. To understand this problem I suggest that any interested person take a critical look at students at an examination hall when such scenes appear on TV. It is difficult to conceive that students can go through years of schooling without impairing their eye- sight.

Yet another factor is their diet. It is with interest that I recall that three to four decades ago, a significant finding was that visual defects were low in the northern part of the island, and lowest in the Jaffna peninsula. This was attributed to the free availability of ‘Murunga’, with its high Vitamin A content. Now the dietary habits of kids have changed as canvassed via TV ads. ‘Greens’ do not form a part of the regular meal. Even if they do, one has to think of the residual agrochemicals contained theirin. Home gardening is the only answer. One also has to consider whether chemical taste enhancers, so common in marketed foods, and also the possibility of such additives having a deleterious effect, on a cumulative basis. Mention must be made of chemicals like carbide that are regularly used to give a ripened look to our fruits. These call for investigations. It is up to the Departments of Education and Health Services to jointly rectify these short-comings.