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This week's donation goes to Fighting Blindness Canada:
https://www.fightingblindness.ca/
While I sometimes support more general charities for the blind and partially sighted, such as the CNIB, I consider it particularly important to fund research foundations which go beyond the immediate day-to-day needs of the community they serve and consider the long-term outlook, whether that entails prevention, treatment or potentially even cure.
They have a very informative newsletter and website and they don't send me endless mailouts of address labels and useless plastic googaws.
I know too that eyesight is very much an issue on my side of the family. Macular degeneration on my mum's side and glaucoma on my dad's, plus early nearsightedness and later bifocals-requirement throughout the family. And just for variety, I needed an operation a few years back to repair a macular hole. And by the way, I can offer high praise to the Retina Centre on Carling Avenue, without which I would probably be blind in my left eye today.
There's an interesting article on treatment of age-related vision loss on the Fighting Blindness Canada site:
https://www.fightingblindness.ca/news/age-related-vision-loss-diseases-and-emerging-treatments/
Early on in the pandemic, there was some suggestion that Hydroxychloroquine (plaquenil) could be a treatment for Covid-19 although that seems to have been mostly discredited now. It's one of the drugs I was taking for my arthritis and while it might have been a nice idea to be able to kill two diseases with one stone, the greater concern for my medical practitioners was its potential for buildup of retinal toxicity. Our bodies are complex systems!
https://www.fightingblindness.ca/
While I sometimes support more general charities for the blind and partially sighted, such as the CNIB, I consider it particularly important to fund research foundations which go beyond the immediate day-to-day needs of the community they serve and consider the long-term outlook, whether that entails prevention, treatment or potentially even cure.
They have a very informative newsletter and website and they don't send me endless mailouts of address labels and useless plastic googaws.
I know too that eyesight is very much an issue on my side of the family. Macular degeneration on my mum's side and glaucoma on my dad's, plus early nearsightedness and later bifocals-requirement throughout the family. And just for variety, I needed an operation a few years back to repair a macular hole. And by the way, I can offer high praise to the Retina Centre on Carling Avenue, without which I would probably be blind in my left eye today.
There's an interesting article on treatment of age-related vision loss on the Fighting Blindness Canada site:
https://www.fightingblindness.ca/news/age-related-vision-loss-diseases-and-emerging-treatments/
Early on in the pandemic, there was some suggestion that Hydroxychloroquine (plaquenil) could be a treatment for Covid-19 although that seems to have been mostly discredited now. It's one of the drugs I was taking for my arthritis and while it might have been a nice idea to be able to kill two diseases with one stone, the greater concern for my medical practitioners was its potential for buildup of retinal toxicity. Our bodies are complex systems!
