The number of spectacle and contact lens wearers should be three times what it is in South Africa today

Think about this: The number of spectacle and contact lens wearers should be three times what it is in South Africa today. According to The Vision Council of America, sixty-one percent of the American population wears some form of vision correction. In contrast, the South African situation is vastly different. SA Statistics reported after the […]

Value your Eyes: Background

According to SA Statistics, only 14,6 % of South Africans wear a visual correction of some sort. I have been intrigued by this statistic for more than twenty years. During the nineties, Standard Optical commissioned Markinor to research the optical market. Their finding was that only 18% of our population wears spectacles or contact lenses. Around 2004, I was lucky enough to meet Barbara Cooke at a wedding which resulted in me getting my hands on statistics from The Brand Survey Company SA Pty Ltd, which showed a similar number. More recently, the SA Stats number was confirmed by survey results kindly supplied to me by Maria Petousis and Chris Kriel from Target Group Index. Whichever way you look at it, these sources all confirmed that the number of spectacle and contact lens wearers in South Africa is absurdly low, considering that the global incidence of refractive error has been widely reported to be more than fifty percent. The rapid increase in myopia worldwide would have pushed the global incidence of refractive error even higher.