It is the 14th National Eye-care Day on June 6. This year the theme of the Eye-care Day is Focus on Youngster’s Eye Health. Nowadays, youngster’s nearsightedness problem gets more and more serious. Since the problem may have an adverse impact on their study and work, the World Health Organization has paid much attention to it. Therefore, myopia control has become a worldwide issue for eye care.

According to statistics, China’s average prevalence of myopia stands at 33.6%. The rate has been increasing by 10% year by year. The myopia incidence on China’s teenagers is nearly 60%, ranking 2nd around the globe, with the world’s largest number of myopia patients. In 2002, Chinese myopia students account for more than 85% among those with poor eyesight at school. The percentages of myopia students are as follows: pupils 26.96%; junior school students 53.43%; senior high school students 72.8%.

To protect students’ eye health, Beijing Municipality has initiated Eye-Care Action in formulating Healthy Beijing–Ten-Year Action Plan for Health Improvement, requesting all schools to conduct an eye test every semester. It is specified that schools have to arrange eye exercises twice a day for students and help them acquire scientific eye-usage knowledge and means. The Action Plan aims at accomplishing Putting Prevention First and Combining Prevention with Control, and curbing the ascending trend on incidence of myopia among youngsters.

Prevention of myopia must start from an early age. First, good habit shall be cultivated. The best way is to use your eyes intermittently, especially, to avoid reading and writing for a long time. After using your eyes in near distance for one hour, you should rest around 10 minutes or look left, right or far out, and try to increase your outdoor activity time as much as possible. Second, you shall get a good lifestyle. You shall have a good diet, pay attention to nutrition, and ensure sufficient sleep. In recent years, scholars at home and abroad have put forward that youngster’s myopia has something to do with in-take of sugar, protein and calcium, deficiency on some micro-nutrient elements in human body, such as chromium, zinc and copper. Third, you shall improve eye-using ambient. Do right lightening and illumination. Indoor illumination shall be neither too dim nor too strong. Using natural light is the best. Fourth, keep doing eye exercises or other similar exercises.