A 23-year-old college student went blind after microscopic bugs ate her eyeballs because she failed to change her contact lenses for six months. Lian Kao, an undergraduate student in Taiwan, has permanently damaged her eyes after a single-cell amoeba slowly devoured her sight, the Daily Mail reports.
Reportedly Kao never removed her disposable contact lenses to clean them and even kept them in her eyes while swimming and showering. A person who wears disposable lenses is urged not to wear them for longer than eight hours a day.
"Medics were horrified when they removed the contact lenses to find that the surface of the girls' 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," the Daily Mail wrote.
Wu Jian Liang, the director of ophthalmology at Taipei's Wan Fang Hospital, was shocked at the discovery but said people who wear contact lenses can easily be exposed to eye diseases if they don't properly care for their lenses.
"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," Jian Lang said, according to the Daily Mail. "The girl should have thrown the contact lenses away after a month but instead she overused them and has now permanently damaged her corneas."
Reportedly Kao was diagnosed with acanthamoeba keratitis, a bug that attaches to the contact lens and then burrows into the eye causing extreme pain. Typically, it's not until this point when a person realizes something is wrong but it's usually too late.