Hugh Taylor takes up presidency of the International Council of Ophthalmology

Dean of the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, Professor Stephen Smith, congratulated Professor Taylor on his appointment.
“Professor Taylor brings with him great experience in both clinical and research work. He has been a champion of improved health outcomes for Australian Indigenous communities,” Professor Smith said.
“His early experience of reviewing Pakistan’s eye-care services on behalf of the World Health Organisation, led him to take up the challenge of convincing governments to take vision loss seriously and donstrating why – with limited and competing health dollars – eye care must be made a global priority.”
Professor Taylor’s new role with the ICO comes at the same time as the most recent statistics on blindness are published in a study in the British Journal of Ophthalmology.
Australia has recorded a 21 per cent reduction in the prevalence of blindness in the last 20 years, according to The Global Burden of Disease study.
“Those figures are encouraging as even though the world’s population increased over this time, the rates of blindness have reduced dramatically so that the actual number of people who are blind has decreased,” Professor Taylor said.
In high-income countries like Australia, the most-common cause of blindness changed from cataract in 1990 to macular degeneration in 2010.
Australia has the lowest rates of blindness and vision loss than the rest of the world and is similar to most high-income countries.While Australia is performing well globally, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders still experience higher rates of blindness due to cataract, uncorrected refractive error, diabetic retinopathy and trachoma.
Professor Taylor warned that as most of that is preventable and treatable, Australia needs to continue to improve access to eye care and ensure that indigenous Australians do not miss out on the essential eye care they need.
“While the figures are encouraging for the general population, the concern is that we are still not making headway with indigenous Australians, as they continue to miss out on the eye care they need. More work needs to be done,” Professor Taylor said.