The need for newborn screening

  In April 2013, the National Health Planning Commission issued the Technical Specification for Children’s Eye and Vision Care, which requires that healthy children receive their first eye screening at one month of life and that high-risk and premature infants be screened for eye disease as early as possible, but current surveys show that most parents are unaware that healthy children should also be screened for eye disease, and few parents take the initiative to bring their young healthy children for eye disease screening. In recent years, the incidence of neonatal eye disease has been increasing year by year, and there is a tendency that some children are late in seeking medical treatment, and some of them have already missed the time for treatment, resulting in irreversible loss of vision, which causes great regret to the children’s life and a great burden to the family and society. Therefore, experts from Beijing Children’s Hospital call for the importance of newborn eye screening, which should be taken seriously by society and families.