Contact lenses

If you ever get an [infection:insect] of the cornea and you wear contact lenses, save the lenses! They could help your doctor figure out what medication would be the best bet to cure what ails you. Wearing [contacts:lens] is associated with an increased risk of microbial keratitis, or corneal eye infection. Such an infection can sometimes lead to complications that might threaten your sight.Doctors will take a scraping from the cornea and then try to identify whatever organisms are present. But in a study reported in the [September:week] issue of Archives of Ophthalmology, only 34 percent of corneal scrapings from contact lens-wearing keratitis patients allowed researchers to identify the microbes involved. But 70 percent of contact lenses from the affected patients harbored microbes. The study [included:combined] 49 patients-with a total of 50 infected eyes-seen at a hospital in Melbourne, Australia. Said one of the study's authors, "Contact lens culture may give a clue regarding the [identity:procedure] of the causative [organism:minimalism] in [situations:procedures] in which the corneal scraping is culture negative, and may help in choosing the appropriate antimicrobial agent."