Two to three of every 10,000 children born each year in the U.S. have a congenital cataract.
With 3.66 million births a year in the U.S., that equates to 732 to 1,098 new congenital cataracts per year. If we add in a small number of acquired and traumatic pediatric cataracts, there are at most 1,500 pediatric cataracts to remove every year in America. This is 0.04% of the 4 million cataracts that undergo surgery each year.
There are just more than 1,000 pediatric ophthalmologists in the U.S. and about 10,000 ophthalmologists who are active as cataract surgeons. If every cataract surgeon chose