Color Blindness

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Color Blindness

Introduction

According to many people, most men are presumed to be colorblind. This is does not mean that they are blind or people do not see any color; it means that they are not able to differentiate some of the colors correctly. To a great extent, people perceive this to be from natural causes and not as a disease. What many people do not know is that color blindness is a disease. Color blindness or color vision deficiency can be described as the inability of a person to differentiate certain colors. These colors include red, green, blue or the mixture of these colors (Webmed, 2012). Color blindness is of great importance to our daily life for instance, when one is driving must be able to tell the traffic lights. Therefore, the history and symptoms of color blindness should be established for easier conclusion.

History

The first paper to be written on color blindness was written by John Dalton titled ‘Extraordinary facts relating to the vision of colors’ in 1793 (Fluck 2006). Dalton wrote this paper focusing on an extraordinary experience happening to him and his brother. He noticed that he and his brother were unable to identify some of the colors correctly as compared to the other people. According to Dalton, he and his brother identified not all but some of the colors differently as compared to the people. “That part of the image which others call red appears to me little more than a shade or defect of light. After that the orange, yellow and green seem one color which descends pretty uniformly from an intense to a rare yellow, making what I should call different shades of yellow” (Fluck 2006). This fascinated him thus making him to research and write about this extraordinary experience. For this reason, people started to refer to the disease as Daltonism in his memory as the first man to establish the disease (Fluck 2006).

According to research done, people are born with color blindness. In this case, parents and teachers are the first to view these symptoms from a child suffering with color vision deficiency. It is worth noting that Color blindness is prevalent to men as compared to the women. According to statistics, eight men out of a possible one hundred have color blindness disease. This is approximately eight percent of the population (Arlene, 2003). On the other hand, one woman out of two hundred is presumed to be suffering from color blindness. This is approximately zero point five percent of the population (Arlene, 2003).

Symptoms

The symptoms of color blindness may vary from one person to another. The first symptom is that a person may only be able to see some colors but he or she cannot view others. In this case, a person may be able to view blue and yellow but cannot tell the difference between red and green (Webmed, 2012). When this situation is compared to the other people, they can be able to see and differentiate all colors. The second symptom is when a person sees so many colors. In this situation, a person may not be aware that he or she sees colors differently as compared to the others (Webmed, 2012).

The other symptom is that a person may only see some few shades of colors and not all. In this case, a person is only able to some colors as compared to other people who can see thousands shades of colors. Finally, though it is extremely rare, a person may have a black and white world. In this case, a person may only see the shades of black and white for their whole lives (Fforde, 2009).

It is worth noting that color blindness or color vision deficiency does not have a cure. This is because many it is not something that can be replaced, removed or added. It is something that happens because of genes. Finally, people should not be worried because it is not a deadly or a chronic disease (Albrecht, 2010).

References

Albrecht, M. (2010). Color blindness. Nature Methods. 7, 10.

Arlene, E. (2003). Color is in the eye of the beholder: a guide to color vision deficiency and colorblindness.New York, NY: CVD Pub.

Fforde, J. (2009). Shades of grey: The road to High Saffron. New York, NY: Viking.

Fluck, D. (2012). Daltonism – Named after John Dalton. Colblindor. Retrieved from: http://www.colblindor.com/2006/04/09/daltonism-named-after-john-dalton/

Webmed, (2012). Color Blindness. Webmd.com. Retrieved from: http://www.webmd.com/eye-health/tc/color-blindness-topic-overview