by Joel Harrison
7. October 2011 11:22
According to Mail Online, though there have been numerous warnings against sleeping with contact lenses, approximately 3 million British people occasionally do that.
The website invokes the example of Katie Richardson, a 24-year-old business journalist from Norwich who often failed to remove her contact lenses before going to sleep and sometimes washed them in tap water. She did not experience any problems because of that until one day she woke up feeling sharp pain in her left eye. It quickly got worse and she ended up at hospital, where she was diagnosed with microbial keratitis, a dangerous, potentially blinding eye condition caused by a variety of microbes (such as bacteria, fungus or acanthamoeba).
An expert interviewed by Mail Online stated that British people are more likely to suffer from microbial keratitis than people from mainland Europe due to the prevalence of water-storage tanks (used for flushing the toilet and even as a source of cold water in the bathroom), in which different microbes thrive.
Richardson, after receiving intensive treatment, is healthy again and assures that she has learnt her lesson and will be much more careful in the future.
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