Welcome to Season 4 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former Commissioner of Health in Baltimore City.

Our goal is to bring

scientific evidence and experience to current topics in public health through engaging interviews

with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more.

If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question at jhhhu.edu.

That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

Today we're talking about children's eyes. I speak with Dr. Megan Collins, a pediatric ophthalmologist

at Johns Hopkins, about the impact

of all that screen time and time away from school on how children see the world.

Let's listen.

Dr. Megan Collins, thank you so much for joining me for this podcast.

Children have been affected in many ways during the pandemic. You're a pediatric

ophthalmologist. How do you see the impact of the pandemic on children? Well, thank you.

It's great to be here today. And one of the things that we've noticed over the past year and a half

is that with the pandemic, there's been a massive disruption of how students

are normally educated, meaning they usually go to the classroom every day in a school building.

And what's happened is so much of their time has been switched to virtual. So we've seen

lots of things coming up because the amount of time kids have been spending on screens.

So there are a lot of questions about how well kids learn on screens, but what happens to their eyes?

So there's some evidence coming out, particularly from Southeast Asia right now, where there had already been a epidemic of myopia, which is nearsightedness,

that due to the pandemic and due to the amount of time that kids are spending on screens

...