Every day we wake up and need to use our eyes,” says Dr Wu Pei-chang, a leading Taiwanese researcher of the subject and director of the Myopia Treatment and Prevention Center at Kaohsiung hospital.
That’s why scientists say the rates are so high in east Asia and Singapore, where the cultures heavily emphasise high educational outcomes, with extensive study time favoured by parents over outdoor play.
Taiwan has one of the world’s highest rates of myopia, alongside most of east Asia and Singapore.
For decades science said myopia was a genetic condition, but from the 1960s and 70s an explosion in rates in east Asian countries – which were concurrently undergoing massive economic and educational expansion – upended that thinking.
Wu, himself shortsighted, was a young resident when he started to notice an alarming number of his patients and colleagues also had myopia, with many facing serious complications of the disease’s advanced progression.
