Original articleThe Kariapatti Pediatric Eye Evaluation Project: baseline ophthalmic data of children aged 15 years or younger in Southern India☆
Section snippets
Methods
For the purposes of the project, we divided Kariapatti into six sectors, each sector comprising a population of approximately 15,000 persons. The separation into six sectors was based on access to and geographical proximity between villages and was not necessarily based on population size. We randomly chose 74 hamlets with a total estimated 35,000 population, including 10,000 to 12,000 children from these six sectors for evaluating ocular morbidity. We did not stratify further within the
Results
We enumerated the population of 74 hamlets between July and December 2002. These 74 hamlets had a total population of 38,001, including 11,206 children (29.5%) aged 15 years or younger. The field-workers were able to screen 10,605 (94.6%) of these 11,206 children. The remaining 601 children could not be screened as they had temporarily migrated out of the region during the period of the survey. Children who could not be screened by the field-workers were more likely to be aged 10 years and
Discussion
Data from our project suggest that the prevalence of ocular morbidity among children is relatively low in this population. Nearly two thirds (according to the Indian criteria) and half (according to WHO criteria) of cases of blindness were either preventable or avoidable in this population.
The door-to-door enumeration and the high rate of response to screening by the field-worker (94.6%) and to clinical examinations of children identified by the fieldworker as requiring further examination
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This study was supported by Seva Canada Society, Canada, Seva Foundation, USA, and Aravind Medical Research Foundation, Madurai, India.