Colour blindness Has An Impact On About Ten Per Cent Of The Population But There Is No treatment As The Problem Is Passed On Via An Inherited Genetic Fault

Colour blindness (also called Colour vision Deficiency) is one of those health problems which almost everyone has heard of. It is, as the name infers, the inability to recognise and see the difference between particular colours. It is caused by a flawed gene in the X chromosome and is far more frequently diagnosed in males than females, although it is apparent that a mother can inherit the faulty gene and pass it on to her offspring.

A very small group of females do have colour blindness, but the amount is only about 0.5% of the population compared to instances of males who have the problem which is thought to be around eight to ten percent of the population, depending on which sources you believe.

The most regular type of colour blindness is that where red and green are difficult to define, or the sufferer finds it hard differentiating between hues of red, green, brown and orange. A rare form of the complaint causes problems with the identification of blues and yellows, and an even rarer mutation means that the sufferer doesn’t see colour at all and instead resides in a black and white world.

The strange thing is that the defect itself is completely harmless (though it may justify some of those seriously bad outfits seen on a night out!) and it doesn’t really have any other unpleasant impact on the overall quality of the sufferer’s ability to see. Obviously, someone who has colour blindness may also be short or long sighted, and whilst corrective lenses or Laser eye surgery may resolve that problem, it will have no effect at all on the individual’s ability to see colours correctly.

The fact that the problem is not harmful and has no other effects on the sufferer means that there are probably quite a number of people out there who haven’t even realised that they suffer from it, until they have a good reason to get their eyes checked. For example, there are some occupations where colour blindness can cause major difficulties and for various quite obvious reasons some organisations may exclude those who suffer. The Royal air Force in the UK has a strict policy of expecting perfect sight and no colour vision defects for their newly recruited pilots. Whilst they will accommodate trained pilots who later develop eye defects and let them use glasses or have Laser eye treatment to resolve the problem, anyone who suffers from colour blindness will have been born with it, so unfortunately there is no chance of them becoming an RAF pilot.

It may seem odd that an eye defect like this has never been subject to research to attempt to find a way of correcting the vision, in particular when there are so many treatments for other eye complaints, such as Laser eye surgery for long and short sightedness, lens removal and replacement for patients with cataracts and conventional surgery to reduce the effects of glaucoma. However, these are all problems which are caused by flaws or imperfections in the inside of the eye itself, rather than a genetic fault passed from generation to generation. It therefore seems improbable that anyone is likely to come up with a miracle Laser eye cure or surgical treatment that can mend a defective colour identification gene.
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