Prevent Blindness is debuting the new Prevent Blindness Children’s Vision Health Map. The online interactive tool is specifically designed to display geographic variations in common children’s vision problems as well as visual impairment and blindness, the organization said in a press release. Data used in the map was provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vision and Eye Health Surveillance System and other sources collected and reported by NORC at the University of Chicago.

The purpose of the Prevent Blindness Children’s Vision Health Map is to provide the public, health-care professionals, public health professionals, program partners and government representatives, with county- and state-level characteristics that may impact children’s vision and eye health conditions and outcomes. According to Prevent Blindness, this data can in turn support the development of policies and practices that improve systems for early detection and treatment of visual acuity loss in children. Users can select different visual health indicators, add filters, or explore relationships between vision health and community-level characteristics, including state child vision screening requirements, math and reading scores, health and disability measures, socioeconomic determinants of health, and eye-care providers per capita.

According to Prevent Blindness, data from the Prevent Blindness Children’s Vision Health Map also provides new information for advocates to help advance the recently introduced Early Detection of Vision Impairments for Children (EDVI) Act. The EDVI Act (H.R. 8400) is legislation that will provide grants to states through a competitive process, with the funds designed to support schools, early childhood professionals, health-care providers, public health professionals, and families with eye health information, updated and evidence-based vision screening methods, improve referrals to eye care, and advance follow-up protocols.

In addition, the Prevent Blindness Children’s Vision Health Map is accompanied by a comprehensive report. Some of the findings from the report include:

• One out of every 122 children in the United States have uncorrectable vision loss. This includes one out of every 137 children aged 0-11 and one out of every 102 children aged 12-17.
• There are 25% more girls with vision loss than boys.
• Non-Hispanic black children have the highest rates of vision loss and blindness. One out of every 89 black children have vision loss, and one out of every 1,000 are permanently blind.
• The five states with the highest prevalence of visual acuity loss among children were the District of Columbia, Mississippi, West Virginia, Arkansas and Nevada.
• Over 760,000 children enrolled in Medicaid and State Children’s Health Insurance Programs insurance coverage were diagnosed in 2019 with either amblyopia (360,000 children) or strabismus (486,000 children).