by Joel Harrison
27. December 2011 09:56
In order to minimise the risk of infection, an eye care expert has warned, contact lenses wearers should never disregard all the safety and hygiene instructions that eye care practitioners and contact lens manufacturers provide.
According to Brendan O’Brien, who is an optometrist publishing articles in the Huffington Post, some experienced contact lens users become careless in the way they maintain and wear their lenses. The expert added that most British contact lens wearers sometimes fail to remove their contacts before going to bed and clean lenses with tap water instead of lens care solution. He cited the case of a journalist writing for the Mail on Sunday, Katie Richardson, who did not follow the hygiene instructions and developed microbial keratitis, a potentially blinding eye disease.
In his latest article, O’Brien also invokes a Dutch study, which revealed that microbial keratitis occurs 20 times more often in individuals who sleep with their contact lenses on than those who remove them for the night, concluding that the warnings printed on labels are there for a reason.
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