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Nov 11, 2024 | 
thenewoptometrist.com | Jamie Irvine
Ghana’s commitment to the “Health for All” movement can be traced back to the 1970s, when the country first adopted the Primary Health Care system. This continued with the establishment of District Health Systems in the 1990s, and, in 2003, saw the development of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) – an initiative that aimed to provide equitable access and financial coverage for basic health care services to its citizens.
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Oct 28, 2024 | 
themedicinemaker.com | Jamie Irvine
In light of Bruno Sepodes' recent appointment as the new Chair of the EMA's Committee for Human Medicinal Products, it feels timely to revisit insights from a 2018 interview where he discussed his focus on rare diseases, shared lessons from his work with the EMA, and highlighted his interest in regulatory science. I became a member of COMP in 2008. From a scientific perspective, the world of rare diseases is very much unknown, with so many questions and so few answers.
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Oct 22, 2024 | 
thenewoptometrist.com | Jamie Irvine
Africa is known to be the most genetically diverse region in the world. It is where a number of hominin lineages – including modern humans – arose and the source of the massive demographic event, known as the “Out of Africa” dispersal, which saw individuals spread throughout the world. Indeed, the signatures of our collective African origin persist in our genomes today.
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Oct 15, 2024 | 
thenewoptometrist.com | Jamie Irvine
The adverse effects of air pollution and, more broadly, climate change pose various implications to eye health and services, with a 2019 Lancet report revealing that every child born today could be impacted and their health shaped at every stage of life resultantly.
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Oct 9, 2024 | 
themedicinemaker.com | Jamie Irvine
“Pain,” as Albert Schweitzer, a French theologian, once said, “is a more terrible lord of mankind than even death itself." It manifests in many forms, both mentally and physically, and holds enormous sway over an individual's life. The mere thought of pain influences us not only when it appears in full force, but also when it remains more or less invisible, dispersed across countless acts such as the care we take in handling a sharp knife.
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Oct 8, 2024 | 
thenewoptometrist.com | Jamie Irvine
The Apple Vision Pro, released earlier this year, offered a glimpse – albeit a flawed one – into the future of technology and content interaction. The head-mounted display is equipped with a passthrough mode that shows real-world surroundings on the device’s internal screens via built-in cameras, as well as virtual elements like expansive movie screens and 3D objects on conjoined high-resolution micro OLED displays.
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Sep 30, 2024 | 
thenewoptometrist.com | Jamie Irvine
Myopia is one of the leading causes of visual impairment worldwide. It affects an estimated 30 percent of the population, and, by 2050, is predicted to increase an additional 20 percent. While refractive errors can be addressed with optical correction, a worrying trend is the rise of high myopia (i.e. myopia greater than -5.00 diopters), which increases the risk of complications like retinal detachment, glaucoma, cataracts, and myopic macular degeneration, and can lead to blindness.
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Sep 18, 2024 | 
thenewoptometrist.com | Jamie Irvine
Despite substantive efforts to bridge the racial and ethnic gap in healthcare professions, optometry and ophthalmology were identified as two fields where most underrepresented minority (URM) groups still lag behind the broader diversity trends in the US. Roughly 12.4 percent of the general population identified as Black or African American in , but only 1.7 percent worked as practicing optometrists and 3.3 percent were optometry students.
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Sep 11, 2024 | 
idtransmission.com | Jamie Irvine
According to the WHO, roughly 39,000,000 people are affected by HIV, with an additional 1,300,000 cases reported each year – from which Africa accounts for more than two-thirds of the positive population. Though researchers have succeeded in managing HIV with lifelong adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART), there is still no cure.
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Sep 4, 2024 | 
thenewoptometrist.com | Jamie Irvine
In 1999, the World Health Organization and International Agency for Prevention of Blindness established the “Vision 2020: Right to Sight” initiative with the goal of eliminating preventable blindness by the year 2020. This saw the creation and adoption of national eye health action plans, increased allocation of resources, as well as ophthalmology training in underserved countries worldwide – from which, many African countries agreed to partake.
