Merely as I think of color blindness I go blank, as to why such thing exists at all. As humans, our main function is to see and make the output of what we see. Nevertheless, there have been extraordinary researches going on in the world, and I hope one day people are cured out of it.

Let’s hear of some of the facts relating to color blindness and its causes:

• Most of the color blindness cases are genetic in nature. Other than this reason it could be caused due to traumatic situations or a past injury. Even an uncalled for chemical exposure could be the cause of color blindness.

• Color blindness is categorized in three types; the first type is a person not capable of distinguishing between the red and green; the second type makes it difficult to differentiate between blue and yellow and the third type cannot detect any colors at all. In latter case, a person’s eye cannot identify any colors.

• A total of 10 percent of males in the US are red-green blind, while only 0.5% women get affected. The world over 99% of people having color blindness has red-green color blindness.

• The blue-yellow color blindness is not very rampant in color blindness cases. It affects someone as per 1:15,000 individuals. This type of color blindness has probability of equally affecting men and women both.

• The total color blindness is called as Monochromacy. It affects one person in every 30,000 people. Monochromatics cannot see any colors; they just see the shades of gray, white and black.

• John Dalton, an English chemist was colorblind, and he was the first person to ever publish scientific paper for colorblind people in the year 1798.

• Color blindness is not limited to humans; it is found in some animals as well. In animals’ case, it proves to be an advantage for some. For instance, the colorblind capuchin monkeys are capable of catching more insects than the non-colorblind monkeys.

• The U.S. Army states that colorblind people are smarter in differentiating between camouflaged objects and beings than the non-colorblind soldiers.

• The research on colorblindness also states that a red-green color blind mother will have sons that are red-green color blind only. (Although this fact is not widely proven, research is still going on.)

• The famous colorblind test called as the Ishihara test was created by a Japanese Ophthalmologist: Shinobu Ishihara. The test uses 38 plates that are filled with colored dots, each of these dots contain a number in shaded color that a colorblind person cannot see.

• It is hard for a colorblind person to distinguish between Red, Green and Yellow traffic lights. Some parts of the world have already prohibited colorblind people from driving. Take the example of Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria.

• Fun Fact: Color blind people usually dream of the same limited colors as they see in their daily waking life. Colorblind people have difficulty eating food as they cannot say if a piece of red meat is cooked or raw. Similarly they cannot differentiate if the banana is green or yellow in color. They also cannot tell whether a tomato is green, ripe or unripe one.
• One particular theory also states as to why more men die as compared to women of colorectal cancer. It says, as more men are subjugated to color blindness, they are unable to detect the blood in their toilet paper after passing bowels.

• One fact states that goldfish is the only animal in the planet that is capable of seeing the infrared and ultraviolet light and they have the farthest range of color vision found in any animal so far. Goldfish can also see spectrum colors easily.

• According to a popular belief it states that dogs and cats can only see shades of gray. These animals, although not completely color blind, can see more colors than the limited range of colors that humans see.