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Excess Time Indoors May Explain Rising Myopia Rates
Nature reports that an unexpected factor may be behind a growing epidemic of nearsightedness: time spent indoors. From the article: Because the eye grows throughout childhood, myopia generally develops in school-age children and adolescents. About one-fifth of university-aged people in East Asia now have this extreme form of myopia, and half of them are expected to develop irreversible vision loss.
This threat has prompted a rise in research to try to understand the causes of the disorder — and scientists are beginning to find answers. They are challenging old ideas that myopia is the domain of the bookish child and are instead coalescing around a new notion: that spending too long indoors is placing children at risk. “We're really trying to give this message now that children need to spend more time outside,” says Kathryn Rose, head of orthoptics at the University of Technology, Sydney.
I work in a basement 200 feet under the ground and I know it feels good to get outside once in a while.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
A few years ago I worked at a desk facing a wall and I got the feeling that it wasn't good for my eyes that they never focussed on anything more than a metre away, so I put a mirror on the wall and I think this has helped my eyes.
I tilted the mirror up a little so I could stare into it whenever I wanted without making eye contact with others.
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In Seoul, a whopping 96.5% of 19-year-old men are short-sighted.
Say what you want about fear-mongering, that's a pretty crazy statistic. Sounds like I should invest in some Korean laser correction company.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
Can we develop an e-book reader that presents a virtual image that must be focused on as though it were at a distance? Let a cohort of Asian kids go through childhood reading from this device and see what happens to their vision.
Wait, they're admitting to doing it for no reason? Something isn't right with that. I've never seen a government agency acknowledge any wrongdoing, they go out of their way to avoid any such thing.
That's not what I said. There are cases where CPS admits -- after investigation -- that they found "no evidence" of abuse or neglect.
At the least, they'd have to claim they couldn't take the risk, that the mere possibility of harm wasn't acceptable.
Yes, and that's what they do. But that doesn't change the fact that they are basically admitting that 1/3 of child removals are done without any substantiated evidence.
Don't get me wrong -- if a child seems in imminent danger, perhaps CPS needs to step in. But the policy with CPS nowadays seems to be "take kid first, ask questions later," which if you're a parent who hasn't done anything wrong seems... well, wrong. Doesn't it?
But don't limit this to police/CPS for children. It hits adults as well. It's bad enough that people with actual mental illness are neglected because nobody can be bothered to care, both in and out of care, it's worse when people are mistreated by those who are supposed to help them
Okay, yeah. I know there are other things wrong in the world. But the topic of TFA is kids not going outside enough. One reason they may not be outside as much is because parents can't always be around their kids, and nowadays society seems to be saying if you can't personally supervise your kid until he/she is 16, you can't have them out of your sight (like outdoors). The abuse of people with mental illnesses and other "wards of the state" is another significant problem, but I'm not sure it's particularly related to TFA.