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Bleaching has the potential to cause irreversible blindness to unborn babies, the Ghana Optometric Association (GOA) has revealed and advised pregnant women to desist from bleaching both the skin and hair. 

The GOA Public Relations Officer, Dr Alfred Gardemor, said bleaching products contain chemicals that could go a long way to have effects on the unborn baby, stressing that high doses of chemicals contained in such products when engrossed into the skin could cause harm to both the pregnant woman and the unborn baby. 

 Dr. Gardemor who is a Principal Optometrist and Head of the Optometric Centre at the Nsawam Government Hospital said this at the sixth Ghana News Agency-Tema Regional Office and the Ghana Optometric Association fortnightly public sensitisation initiative “GNA-GOA: My Eye! My Vision! 

The fortnight initiative is a collaborative public education advocacy campaign to promote the need for people to access eye care and to draw attention to vision health. 

 The GNA-GOA: My Eyes! My Vision! The initiative also seeks to challenge the public and policymakers to focus on vision as a health issue, which forms a critical component of mankind’s wellbeing but is often neglected. 

Dr Gardemor who spoke on the topic, “Children’s Vision and Eye Health,” explained that pregnancy changed the hormone level and could make the skin more sensitive than normal leading the skin to react to certain chemicals applied to the body. 

He said chemicals in bleaching cosmetics could cause inflammation, scarring, and abnormalities among newborn babies if used during pregnancy and breastfeeding.  He noted that during the process of bleached hair, some of the harmful substances penetrate the skin to the body and that could go a long way to affect the baby. 

Dr Gardemor said it could lead to premature babies, giving birth to babies with low birth weight, taking longer to conceive, and pregnancy loss.  He added that skin bleaching agents increase the susceptibility to infections and viruses making it easy for the skin to react. 

He expressed concern that most eye infections among babies were usually not detected early and led to key issues during the growth of the child.