MALAYSIANSKINI | As a child, Shantini Guna Rajan would sit for hours, obsessing over National Geographic, dreaming of being a wildlife photographer.

But before she could even master shutter speed, her vision blurred so fast that the class monitor went from sitting in the back of the class to the front row within a week.

“I was born perfectly sighted but, at the age of eight and a half, my vision just dropped,” said Shantini, now WWF-Malaysia’s national policy lead.

Diagnosed with a genetic eye disease, Shantini, 40, still faces uncertainty about the exact cause for the rapid deterioration of her vision, even decades later, with various possible diagnoses presented over the years.

“I was sitting in the first row and could read the board. Then, even from the front row, I couldn’t see the board.

“It’s an accelerated rate of...