What's causing the cataract epidemic?

Strangely, we seem to be in the midst of a cataract epidemic!  It seems that everyone I know is having to have their lenses replaced, and I have been experiencing glare and other issues that suggest the same may be looming for me.

It is the personal experience that drew my attention to this epidemic.  That is, I have seen no stories about this in Science or the public news media.  That is very strange, since they seem to seize upon any even marginally interesting story.  Yet this epidemic has not hit the headlines, at least not yet.

So what could be causing it?  This is far, far from my area expertise, so I can only speculate in very generic terms. What has changed that might have epidemic consequences?  Here are a list of candidate factors that may have changed recently enough to be responsible (but I confess it is just a guess-list):

(1) Is it food?  With processed and GMO animal and plant foods increasing their prevalence, widely and recently, as well as pollution of the seas from which seafoods come, an obvious suspect would be dietary.  Junk foods and other such habits could have effects that are subtle but accumulate, with delayed-onset vision consequences.  Dietary factors clearly are, after all, responsible for many ‘modern’ diseases. 

(2) Is it viral or infectious?  So many of us move around the country and, indeed, the world that any virus arising even in a remote part of the globe can rapidly spread.  Air transport from tropical to temperate zones would be a major suspect, as would international transport of goods and so on.  But what virus or infectious agent might be involved is unclear, nor do we know where a similar epidemic might be occurring, unreported. 

(3) Is it recent environmental contamination, in air or water?  It is impossible to ignore global air and water pollution as potential cataract causing factors–even if the mechanism itself is not known.  After all, has it even been examined, given that the epidemic hasn’t yet really been recognized?  Air and water currents circulate widely around the world, which could make the causal source of the epidemic very distant from the consequences.  It might not even be suspected.  After all, the lens is a very special kind of tissue and a connection may be very strange relative to what the usual exposure-consequence studies look for, not to mention the statistical methods used which could be quite inapt. 

(4) Or, being very cynical, could it be marketing or profiteering by the companies that make the gear and supplies that are involved?  In that case, perhaps the idea that there is a real epidemic may be mistake–we would just be being told that there was.  This subjective, cultural sort of factor would be vary difficult to document.  After all, gear-makers do need to make sales of their gear.

Overall, I am stunned at what seems to me to be an obvious but almost wholly unreported yet major epidemic that seriously threatens quality of life.  As I must acknowledge in what is a speculative blog post, the whole story could be my ignorance of the literature.  I am a geneticist, but I have seen no reason to think this could be genetic, since our population’s genotypes have not changed in any substantial way in the recent decade or so.  But if not genetics, then what?  One must at least ask that question!  Yet, strangely I think, the professional epidemiological literature seems to have ignored or even been unaware of the major epidemic, which from my point of view seems clear to me; such neglect is very hard to understand, since (again, to be rather cynical) epidemiologists are naturally eager for any Big Problem they can find to justify Big Studies.

This blog site is usually about genetic causation and its associated scientific issues, but once the question of the seeming neglect of a cataract epidemic struck me, I decided I should at least use Mermaid’s Tale to air it.  I would welcome any comments that raised original or even partly plausible explanations.

However, and finally, I must end by acknowledging that I have done no rigorous study of the cataract problem.  Indeed, at my age, I should long ago have learned to avoid the temptation to talk to so many of my peers about it.  It could frighten them.  Before suggesting that it is a major epidemic, I should think about who I’m talking to.