Hollywood ’s top directors, producers and celebrities join this year’s 31 st Annual Vision Awards in its first-ever television broadcast. Along with this year’s Lester Sill Humanitarian Award - Lifetime Achievement in Music honoree, Arif Mardin, are some of today’s top television shows and motion pictures which have been described for the blind, and which also receive honors on this “Hollywood Cures Blindness” gala presentation.

This special broadcast includes the first-ever Television Eye Test that will help aid early detection of oncoming blindness in children, and the now known precaution of wearing UV protected lenses. Other information, including the macular degeneration test, which will be featured on-air, can be downloaded at www.VisionAwards.org.

“Thirty seven million people now have no ability to read print,” says RP International’s founder Helen Harris, herself now blinded from one of the degenerative blinding diseases, Retinitis Pigmentosa. Harris and Hollywood joined hands over 31 years ago when two of her three sons were diagnosed with the same degenerative disease.

The 3- hour broadcast includes awards for outstanding achievement in film, television, music and technology. The breakthrough Jules Stein Living Tribute Award recipient this year is Gavin Herbert, Founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Allergan company. Other honorees include SAG President Melissa Gilbert, Film Artist Laurence Fishburne, Director John Singleton, President of Clear Channel Entertainment Brian Becker, and many more.

June Foray Donovan, famous voice artist of such animated classics as Rocky and Bullwinkle, presented the Lifetime Achievement in Animation Award to the legendary Bill Melendez, whose body of work includes the Bugs Bunny “Looney Tunes,” the Charlie Brown “Peanuts” animated television specials, and classic Disney animated films such as Bambi, Dumbo and the Mickey Mouse/Donald Duck shorts.

This broadcast is the first-ever airing of the 31 year-old Vision Awards because of the noticeably increasing numbers of people now developing macular degeneration and losing precious eyesight. RP International, which hosts the Vision Awards, now receives calls from people as young as thirty with juvenile macular degeneration.

States Harris, “I told so many doctors, so many researchers so long ago that this day was coming. It really makes me sad to have had to wait until the numbers reached these millions with macular degeneration before anyone would begin to really listen.”

Now the advocate diligently pursues pharmaceutical companies and recalls the three congressional testimonies she gave to Congress beginning in the early nineties. “It fell on deaf ears”, Harris remembers vividly, “because the numbers were not high enough.”

Now that The Vision Awards is set to premiere on television, Harris hopes that it will not only salute Hollywood’s top film, television and music artists, but that it will bring home awareness programs into schools and employment environments so that adjustments can be made quickly when someone is diagnosed.

RP International is a non-profit organization, which hopes to raise enough funds to connect the nation’s top eye institutes together for quarterly conferences instead of the once-a-year meeting in Florida.

For further information, visit the Vision Awards website at: www.VisionAwards.org. Email RPInt@pacbell.net.