We always try and stress the importance of lens hygiene and how important it is to remove your contacts before you go to sleep. However, most of the three million contact lens wearers in Britain often fall asleep with taking out and rinsing their contact lenses. Another poor habit is using tap water to clean lenses when sterile lens cleaning solution is not available.
Katie Richardson demonstrated in The Mail on Sunday that it really is important to heed the warnings! Katie, a business journalist from Norwich, often slept with her contact lenses in and occasionally washed them with tap water. She woke up one morning in May with a pain in her left eye.
Katie says: "I thought it was conjunctivitis and bought some drops but this unusual stabbing pain kept getting worse. My eye was red and weeping with a distinct red rim around the iris. Soon it hurt to be in the light. I had to sit in a darkened room, unable to watch television or read."
It turns out Katie had contracted microbial keratitis - an infection of the cornea. was extremely lucky that the condition was caught early as it can cause your eyesight to deteriorate rapidly and without immediate treatment there is even a risk of losing your eyesight permanently.
A Dutch study in 1999 found that soft-lens wearers were three times more likely to get microbial keratitis than those who wore rigid gas-permeable lenses and people who left their lenses in overnight were almost 20 times more likely to develop the condition.
So we urge you to take the utmost care with your lenses and ALWAYS remove them before going to sleep!