Don’t let glaucoma darken your life!

Another year, a new theme: Last year’s theme, "Don’t lose sight of your family", was borrowed from Glaucoma Australia, which had used it to run several successful campaigns. To select a suitable theme for 2012, a poll was made among WGW coordinators and on the WGW facebook page, and several ideas came up. The top 3 were then proposed to the vote of the Paris 2011 World Glaucoma Congress participants, who were asked to cast their ballot in the World Glaucoma Association booth.  The winning theme – by far – was "Don’t Let Glaucoma Darken Your Life".

The new theme, with its various possible interpretations, lends itself admirably to the development of screening and prevention activities, but equally well to solidarity and support campaigns. Think about it: Glaucoma can darken the patient’s vision through developing and expanding scotomas; it can darken the patient’s psychology through anguish about the future; it can also darken the lives of the patient’s family through fear about their beloved person’s sight; finally – and maybe most important – it can create a strong guilt to a glaucoma patient who has kept the disease secret for whatever reason and learns that a beloved relative, sibling or child, has lost vision because of late diagnosis – a strong incentive to push one’s relatives to get screened!