Taiwanese Student Goes Blind After Keeping Her Contact Lenses In For 6 Months

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A student in Taiwan who kept a pair of disposable contact lenses in her eyes for six months has been left blinded after a microscopic bug devoured her eyeballs.  The tiny single-cell amoeba ate away at undergraduate Lian Kao’s sight because she didn’t take out and clean the contacts once during that time.

According to a warning issued by doctors the case was a particularly severe example of a young person under pressure who did not take the time to carry out basic hygiene on their contact lenses. As well as being regularly cleaned, contact lenses should also be removed when swimming and washing.

The general advice is to avoid wearing contacts for more than eight hours a day. Yet apparently 23-year-old Kao had even kept her contact lenses in at all times, even at the swimming pool.

Medics were horrified when they removed the contact lenses to find that the surface of the girl’s eyes had literally been eaten by the amoeba that had been able to breed in the perfect conditions that existed between the contact lens and the eye.