Colour blindness Impacts upon One In Ten Of The Population But There Is No cure As The Problem Is Caused By An Inherited Genetic Defect

Colour blindness (also called Colour vision Deficiency) is one of those health issues which virtually everyone has heard of. It is, as the name implies, the inability to recognise and see the difference between particular colours. It is caused by a faulty gene in the X chromosome and is far more regularly found to affect males than females, although it is a fact that a mother can have the faulty gene and transmit it to her offspring.

A very small group of females do suffer from colour blindness, but the amount is only approximately half a percent of the population as against instances of males who suffer from the problem which is believed 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 become difficult to perceive, or the sufferer has problems differentiating between hues of red, green, brown and orange. A rare strain of the complaint prevents identification of blues and yellows, and an even more obscure mutation 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 defect itself is completely harmless (though it may excuse some of those ropey outfits best avoided on a night out!) and it doesn’t usually have any other unpleasant impact on the overall quality of the sufferer’s vision. Obviously, someone with colour blindness may also be short or long sighted, and while corrective lenses or Laser eye surgery may resolve that problem, it will have no effect at all on the individual’s ability to identify colours correctly.

The fact that the problem is not harmful and has no other impact 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 problems and for several 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 allow them to use glasses or have Laser eye treatment to resolve the problem, anyone who suffers from colour blindness will have suffered with it since birth, so regrettably there is no likelihood of them becoming an RAF pilot.

It may seem odd that an eye defect such as this has never been subject to research to try and find a way of correcting the vision, especially 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 those with cataracts and conventional surgery to reduce the impact of glaucoma. However, these are all issues which are caused by faults or imperfections in the parts of the eye itself, rather than a genetic fault passed from generation to generation. It therefore seems unlikely 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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