Cheap Contact Lenses and Your Eye Health

Cheap and discounted contact lenses - they're probably one of the most mistreated items we own, yet they're vital to healthy eyes. But with a few simple care tips we can really turn things around. With so many discount contact lens suppliers it's not even a major financial issue any more. Would you believe a recent survey discovered that lots of people clean their contact lens by licking or sucking them clean. Many people wear them for several days at a time without removing them; we sleep in them, swim in them and lean them with tap water (which has high levels of bacteria).

Yet it's easy to understand how we can take them for granted - the soft contact lenses in particular are so comfortable it's easy to forget about them. But by not taking care of them - a quick dip in some contact lens cleaner is all that's needed - we leave ourselves open to some rather nasty eye infections which can quickly lead to serious medical complications.

Bacterial infections can cause painful inflammations in the cornea. Organisms living in tap water can colonize the eye and resist most drugs intending to kill them off. In severe cases, patients can go blind or require cornea transplants. In our area, the past 18 months has seen higher numbers of patients infected with a particularly nasty protozoan called Acanthamoeba.

Rocco, 20, (of Algonquin) only wore his contacts a few months before he began waking up to throbbing pain in his left eye, which had turned red. Rocco, who had just returned home from his freshman year at Eastern Illinois University, went to a family doctor expecting a diagnosis of pink eye. It was Acanthamoeba.

Six months and three doctors later, Rocco underwent a cornea transplant. It was the only way doctors could save his vision after medications failed to kill the amoebas colonizing his left eye, causing scar tissue to blur his eyesight.

Unfortunately this young man is now facing another cornea transplant in is other eye - so it's imperative to keep your lenses clean all the time, and take great care of them.

Having said all that, outbreaks of Acanthamoeba are still relatively rare. Statistics show that there are only about one or two reported cases of it in every one million contact lens wearers. The more common problem is bacterial infections, which affect approximately 1 in every 2500 wearers each year.

One of the main reasons you need to keep your lenses clean is that a contact lense interferes with your eyes natural defence system. Without a lens in your eye, every time you blink, you eyelid washes away any bacteria in there, and keeps your eye clean. When we put a contact lens in there, your eyelid is no longer in contact with the top layer of your eye, and therefore is unable to keep it clean. The cleaning job must now be done with your lens.

Article Source: http://www.myaddirectory.com

Eye care consultant John Jones explains why, with so many discounted contact lens suppliers offering cheap lenses it easy to overlook the need for lens hygiene, and why contact lens cleaner is necessary

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