Genetic Dry Fly

Genetic Dry Fly

Colour Blindness Is Diagnosed In A Significant Proportion Of The Population But There Is No Cure As The Complaint Is Caused By An Inherited Genetic Flaw

Colour Blindness (also referred to as Colour Vision Deficiency) is one of those health issues which virtually everyone has heard of. It is, as the name infers, the inability to identify and see the difference between particular colours. It is caused by a faulty gene in the X chromosome and is far more regularly found in males than females, although it is a fact that a mother can inherit the faulty gene and transfer it to her offspring.

A very small number of females do have colour blindness, but the figure is only approximately half a percent of the population as opposed to instances of males who have the problem which is claimed to be approximately eight to ten percent of the population, depending on which resources you believe.

The most common type of colour blindness is that when red and green become difficult to identify, or the sufferer has problems differentiating between shades of red, green, brown and orange. A rare strain of the complaint prevents identification of blues and yellows, and an even rarer mutation means that the sufferer will not see colour at all and instead lives in a black and white world.

The strange thing is that the complaint itself is completely harmless (though it may justify some of those seriously bad outfits best avoided on a night out!) and it doesn’t really have any other serious impact on the general quality of the sufferer’s ability to see. Naturally, someone with colour blindness might also be short or long sighted, and even though corrective lenses or Laser eye surgery may fix that problem, it will have no effect at all on the individual’s ability to identify colours correctly.

The fact that the problem is not harmful and has no side-effects on the sufferer means that there are possibly quite a few of people out there who haven’t even realised that they suffer from it, until they have some reason to get their eyes tested. For example, there are some jobs where colour blindness can cause big issues and for various quite obvious reasons some organisations may exclude those who suffer. The Royal Air Force in the UK has a strict policy of requiring perfect sight and no colour vision defects for their newly recruited pilots. Whilst they will continue to support trained pilots who later experience eye defects and let them use glasses or have Laser eye treatment to rectify the problem, anyone who has colour blindness will have suffered with it since birth, so sadly there is no possibility of them becoming an RAF pilot.

It may seem odd that an eye defect like this has not ever been subject to research to attempt to find a way of correcting the vision, in particular when there are numerous treatments for other eye complaints, such as Laser eye surgery for long and short sightedness, lens removal and replacement for those with cataracts and conventional surgery to relieve the problem of glaucoma. However, these are all problems which are caused by defects or imperfections in the workings of the eye itself, and not a genetic fault passed from generation to generation. It therefore seems unlikely that anyone is likely to come up with a miracle Laser eye cure or surgical treatment that can repair a defective colour identification gene.