Terrible: Student goes blind after leaving eye contacts on for 6 months
Lian Kao, a Taiwanese student recently became blind due to eyeball-eating amoebas.
Daily Mail
reports that the hungry single-celled organisms formed after she
knowingly left her contacts in for six months straight without changing
or cleaning the lenses.
The lack of attention to eye hygiene
created a breeding ground for an acanthamoeba infection to form in her
contacts and her corneas. After the amoebas formed, they began burrowing
into the student’s eyeballs, causing her to lose her vision.
She allegedly left the one pair of contacts in even while swimming and sleeping.
Wu Juan-liang, the director of ophthalmology at Taipei’s Wan Fang Hospital, explained.“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.
