The 7th Military Vision Symposium on Ocular Readiness for Military Conflicts and Civilian Casualties

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Abstract: This application is a request for funding to support of the 7th Military Vision Symposium that is the only meeting of its kind bringing together military and civilian ophthalmologists, optometrists and vision researchers. Over the years, these meetings have provided an exciting and unique forum to exchange information and explore the critical unmet needs of traumatic ocular injuries. Combat ocular injuries have increased steadily in wars and continue to occur in the military conflicts in the Middle East and Africa where American soldiers are deployed, as well as in terrorist and other mass casualty events in the United States. Military eye injuries have increased by 7-21% over recent years due to increased survival of individuals with previously life threatening injuries, with women having more eye injuries than men. From 2000-2010 there were 186,555 eye injuries worldwide in military medical facilities. Based on published data, during this period the total cost of eye injuries in the military each year has been $2.282 billion, which represents superficial eye injury, non- superficial eye injury, and vision impairment related to Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). Added to the military eye injuries are the civilian injuries that occur in terrorist attacks and mass casualty events such as explosions from oil carrying freight cars or in the work place. Terrorist attacks on civilian targets in the United States and world-wide show no sign of abating. There is no database that analyzes eye injuries from all these types of trauma and/or blast events in the United States. The development of effective treatments for eye injuries from trauma and blasts is of paramount importance to preserve vision in our military personnel who are in harm’s’ way as well as for civilians in terrorist and mass casualty events. There is a clear need for military ophthalmologists and optometrists to interact with civilian clinicians and basic researchers to leverage new advances and technologies to repair and rehabilitate military eye injuries from blasts. The proposed symposium will provide the opportunity for such interactions.