It is incredibly unlikely that a bacterial infection from tap water would be able to manifest itself on an otherwise healthy eye in less than 16(?) hours. The timeframe/exposure just doesn't add up for me.
Hello, I'm the person in this piece. I can confirm I was definitely only wearing dailies for single day then throwing them away. I didn't swim in them but I am not sure about showering. Just to be really clear- acanthamoeba is not a bacterium, it is a single celled organism - a type of amoeba. The infection can take hold in just a few hours, after a single exposure to water. I am happy to answer any other questions you have on this.
>It is incredibly unlikely that a bacterial infection from tap water
It's not bacterial, it's amoebic.
I think you're being unduly skeptical and I can't find a reason beyond your own intuition, which doesn't really hold much weight against first hand accounts from individuals and trusted news sources without any clear bias or motivation to be misleading.
I'm not skeptical that this problem is correlated with wearing contact lenses, I'm skeptical that this problem is not correlated to wearing them correctly.
My point is: who is more likely to get an infection? The people that sterilize their cuts and scrapes, or the people that don't? Same thing here: for such a tiny subset of total contact wearers, it's unlikely that it has nothing to do with your lens hygiene. I doubt any one of the 125 AK sufferers in the UK were following recommended lens care/application to the letter. That does not seem unduly skeptical to me.
I'm no kind of expert, but I know the infamous "brain-eating amoeba" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naegleria_fowleri) can kill in days. It seems like a lot of things have to go wrong
at once to get an amoebic infection, but once you do they're really, really nasty.
Given that we're talking about an affliction that affects only 125 of the ~65 million people in the UK, 'incredibly unlikely' seems like a fair characterization. But even an incredibly unlikely event is going to nevertheless happen to to a few unlucky individuals when the sample size is this large, and I don't see how we have any reason to believe she is being dishonest or otherwise misrepresenting the facts.
Right and in the article the doctors even felt like they caught it early. They gave her powerful medication and even surgical replacements.
Her case just make have been incredibly invasive? The medication may have pushed the infection deeper into the eye or surrounding tissue, or it may have developed resistance.
AK can go from no symptoms to significant risk to lose eyesight in less than 12 hours, and you can absolutely get it even when following suggested procedures.
A friend of mine got it just a month ago, and luckily he got it diagnosed correctly right away. He woke up in the morning with no issue, and by the evening he was in the emergency room. A quick diagnosis saved his eyesight despite the very aggressive onset, the fastest the doctor treating him had ever seen.
Maybe AK is silently established in the eye sometimes, and an abrasion or some other factor allows it to take hold in the cornea? My friend was soldering with bad ventilation and he probably got plenty of microscopic resin particles in his eyes, which might have caused abrasions? His AK took hold right on the edge under the contacts.
A. wearing dailies for only a day at a time
B. didn't shower/swim with them
It is incredibly unlikely that a bacterial infection from tap water would be able to manifest itself on an otherwise healthy eye in less than 16(?) hours. The timeframe/exposure just doesn't add up for me.