A Taiwanese student has gone blind after keeping contact lenses in her eyes for six months straight. NO NO NO NO NO.
By not taking her lenses out or cleaning them at all, Lian Kao created the perfect condition between her eyeball and the lens for acanthamoeba to develop. The single cell bugs can apparently “burrow their way through the cornea,” and that’s exactly what happened to Kao—that shit literally ate up the surface of her eyeballs.
Via Daily Mail:
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.’
Alright contacts wearing people, there is your horrific cautionary tale. Please take good care of your eyeballs, don’t do the thing where you mix up your contact solution with the hydrogen peroxide disinfecting solution, and try not to develop eyeball-eating amoeba.
The more you know.
Image via Shutterstock.