Woman Didn’t Take Her Contacts Out For Six Months And An Amoeba Ate Her Eyeballs
A student
in Taiwan who kept a pair of disposable contact lenses in her eyes for
six months has been left blinded after a microscopic bug devoured her
eyeballs the Daily Mail reports.
The
tiny single-cell amoeba ate away at undergraduate Lian Kao's sight
because she didn't take out and clean the contacts once during that
time.
According
to a warning issued by doctors the case was a particularly severe
example of a young person under pressure who did not take the time to
carry out basic hygiene on their contact lenses.
As well as being regularly cleaned, contact lenses should also be removed when swimming and washing.
The general advice is to avoid wearing contacts for more than eight hours a day.
Yet apparently 23-year-old Kao had even kept her contact lenses in at all times, even at the swimming pool.
Medics
were horrified when they removed the contact lenses to find that the
surface of the girl's eyes had literally been eaten by the amoeba that
had been able to breed in the perfect conditions that existed between
the contact lens and the eye.
The director
of ophthalmology at Taipei's Wan Fang Hospital, Wu Jian-liang, said:
'Contact lens wearers are a high-risk group that can easily be exposed
to eye diseases.
'A
shortage of oxygen can destroy the surface of the epithelial tissue,
creating tiny wounds into which the bacteria can easily infect,
spreading to the rest of the eye and providing a perfect breeding
ground.
'The
girl should have thrown the contact lenses away after a month but
instead she overused them and has now permanently damaged her corneas.'
He said that she had been diagnosed with acanthamoeba keratitis, which although rare was always more common in the summer.
He confirmed and spoke about the girl's case as a way of urging others to be more careful if they had to use contact lenses.
The
problem is the condition can build up over several years - it's only
when it gets to an advanced stage that contacts wearers become aware of a
problem, as that's when it will cause red, irritated eyes, by which
time it may be too late.
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