Caught short without your contact lens case or care solutions? Lens unexpectedly falls out? What would you do? NBA star Ron Baker last year chose to pop his lens in his mouth to wet it and then place it back in his eye.
Scientists from the Centre for Ocular Research & Education (CORE) at the University of Waterloo in Canada conducted an eye-popping experiment to help consumers picture the risks of poor contact lens hygiene.
To demonstrate the rapid growth of bacteria associated with mishandling contact lenses, CORE researchers exposed new, clean contact lenses to human saliva and then placed them into petri dishes for monitoring. The action of putting a contact lens in the mouth resulted in significant growth of microorganisms after only two days of incubation (Figure 1).
They then examined the effect of handling contact lenses with both clean and unwashed hands. Samples that had been placed in the mouth or touched with unwashed hands showed significantly higher numbers of visible bacteria. By comparison, the contact lens touched with clean hands had only a minimal bacterial load (Figure 2).
