Colour blindness Impacts upon About Ten Per Cent Of The Population But There Is No cure As The Complaint Is Passed On Via An Inherited Genetic Flaw

Colour blindness (also known as Colour vision Deficiency) is one of those health issues which virtually everyone has heard of. It is, as the name implies, the inability to identify and see the difference between particular colours. It is caused by a defective gene in the X chromosome and is far more often diagnosed in males than females, although it is clear that a mother can possess the faulty gene and transfer it to her offspring.

A very small group of females do experience colour blindness, but the amount is only roughly half a percent of the population compared to instances of males who experience the problem which is claimed to be somewhere between eight to ten percent of the population, depending on which surveys you believe.

The most regular type of colour blindness is that when red and green are difficult to identify, or the sufferer finds it hard differentiating between hues of red, green, brown and orange. A rare strain of the complaint affects identification of blues and yellows, and an even more obscure variation means that the sufferer doesn’t see colour at all and instead resides in a black and white world.

The odd thing is that the complaint itself is completely harmless (though it may excuse some of those seriously bad outfits best avoided on a night out!) and it doesn’t generally have any other serious impact on the general quality of the sufferer’s ability to see. Obviously, someone who has colour blindness may also be short or long sighted, and while corrective lenses or Laser eye surgery may fix that problem, it will have no effect at all on the individual’s ability to view colours correctly.

The fact that the problem is harmless and has no side-effects on the sufferer means that there are possibly quite a lot of of people out there who don’t even realise that they suffer from it, until they have a good reason to get their eyes assessed. For example, there are some occupations where colour blindness can cause a lot of issues and for a number of quite obvious reasons some organisations may exclude those who suffer. The Royal air Force in the UK has a strict policy of insisting on perfect sight and no colour vision defects for their newly recruited pilots. Whilst they will continue to support trained pilots who later suffer with eye defects and permit them to use glasses or have Laser eye treatment to rectify the problem, anyone who suffers from colour blindness will have suffered with it since birth, so unfortunately there is no possibility of them becoming an RAF pilot.

It may seem strange that an eye defect like this has not been subject to research to try and find a way of correcting the vision, particularly when there are many treatments for other eye complaints, such as Laser eye surgery for long and short sightedness, lens removal and replacement for eyes with cataracts and conventional surgery to relieve the impact of glaucoma. However, these are all complaints which are caused by faults or imperfections in the inside of the eye itself, rather than a genetic fault inherited from generation to generation. It therefore seems improbable that science is likely to come up with a miracle Laser eye cure or surgical treatment that can fix a defective colour identification gene.
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