Color Blindness
A Hereditary Disorder
What is Color Blindness?
Color blindness is a genetic disorder passed down through hereditary (Greene 8) Most people that have colorblindness got the disorder from their parents (Braus 8). The color blindness trait is passed on the x sex chromosome and is caused by a recessive color vision gene (Braus 8). Color blindness, a sex-linked disorder causes people that are affected to not be able to distinguish from different colors (Bailey 1). People with color blindness could eventually pass down the disorder to the offspring depending on what allele they pass (Bailey 26).
How is Color Blindness Tested?
One of the most common ways that color blindness can be identified is through the Ishiara test (Braus 17). The Ishiara test is a plate with a circle made up of dots in various colors, which can be seen in the upper right picture (Braus 17) A person with normal color vision should be able to distinguish a large number in the circle, while people with colorblindness won't be able to see anything (Braus 16 and 17).
So What Does Color Blindness Look like?
Many people wonder what the world looks like to people with color blindness. Above is a picture of the rainbow normally compared to someone who has a moderate red-green color blindness. Picture Picture Right
Stats on Color Blindness
7% of the men in the world have a form of colorblindness (Braus 1). While only 0.6% of the women in the world have color blindness (Braus 1). This occurs because since men only have one X chromosome, no matter if the disorder is dominant or recessive the gene will be expressed in males (Braus 8). Since woman have two X chromosomes, they would need to have both X chromosome to have the recessive color vision of allele to be colorblind (Braus 8). This is why more men have color blindness rather than females. Almost 3 million people living in the UK are color blind (Mandal 1).
Life with Color Blindness
One of the things about color blindness is that it is hard to do any prenatal test. This is because the color cones that are damaged by color blindness don't start to work until a few months after birth (Greene 6). Many people with color blindness are able to live a pretty normal life. They are normally able to find ways to tell the difference of the color deficient colors (Greene 14). For example, at a stoplight the position of the light is able to tell color blind people what color it is (Greene 14). They still might have trouble though picking out clothing colors that match.
Research on Color Blindness
So far their has not been a cure found for color blindness (Bailey 30). There are some things that people can use to deal with color blindness. For example, there are some types of glasses that can help with color vision (Bailey 34). Scientist have been able to cure color blindness in other species besides humans thou, like monkeys (Bailey 38).