Apr
I was cleaning my contact, rubbing it with the proper solution and I noticed I hadn't dried my hands properly and I think I might have gotten a drop or two of water on my lense. Is it possible to get the acanthamoebic infection if I use the lense again? I'm very worried but if there isn't a risk I'd rather not buy a new pair.
Answer:
i always get water on them its fine! Once i put mine in water instead of the solution and my eyes were fine! Hope that helps
Answer:
As long as it's clean water it won't injured. You get tap water in your eyes when showering. If you're really worried just re-clean the lenses but the tap water is probably cleaner than the towel you forgot to use.
I use hard lenses and the cleaning instructions say to rinse them under the tap, after using the first cleaning solution, before putting them in the second soaking solution.
Answer:
It's probably possible, but it's only water. how often does water get in your eye when you shower?
And if you're so worried, can't you just wash it again?
Answer:
Acanthamoeba is very common in tap water, pool water, rain water, dirt, grass etc. Acanthamoeba infection however is very rare, nearly non-existent in people who do not wear contacts unless they’ve experienced a penetrating eye wound from a twig or something. Nearly all of the people who do get it are contact lens wearers. In spite of this, the reason we are so cautious about it is not that it is so common (among compliant lens wearers), but because it is so devastating to the eye in the unlikely event that you do get it. The actual rates of infection in the US that I have seen published are about 1 in 500,000 for the general population but about 1 in 10,000 for contact wearers. When you take into account the number of contact wearers who do completely stupid things with their lenses (as can be seen very easily by browsing Yahoo Answers) the odds of a compliant wearer getting it are probably very low as well.
Soap cleans your hands not because it is toxic to germs, but because it is ionically charged. Germs stick to the soap film and are flushed away. Contact lens materials are also ionically charged and germs (and protein and lipids) stick to them too. An amoeba in a healthy eye without a contact in it would be rapidly flushed away by the tears. It can't get a grip. With a contact, the little bugs cling to it and begin to infiltrate and colonize the lens materials. Now they have a home base next to your eye and are not getting flushed away. Any scratch in the cornea is fair game if they can get in to it. This ionic attraction to the lens material is why getting water in your eyes in the shower is so different from exposing your lenses to the same water.
So what can you do? Well, I use a peroxide solution to clean my lenses daily. Once a week I soak my lenses for 8 hours in the peroxide without the catalyst disk in the case. That amount of time has been shown to be effective against Acanthamoeba cysts and fungi. I then change the solution and do a normal 6 hour neutralization. I also did this recently when I was trimming tree branches and some water from the leaves got into my eye, just because it seemed to be smarter than not doing anything.
I also use Miraflow a couple times a week to clean lipid deposits from them. Miraflow has isopropyl alcohol in it and has been shown to be effective against cysts when used in conjunction with a peroxide system like AOSept or Clear Care.
All that being stated, while you’re extremely unlikely to get an Acanthamoeba infection from just a few drops of water on your fingers, regularly exposing your lenses to water multiplies your chances and sets you up to be the unfortunate one in 10,000.