ShareCompartir
Announcements: Contact Lens Health Week — November 17–21, 2014
November 17–21, 2014, marks the first annual Contact Lens Health Week. In close collaboration with partners from clinical, public health, industry, and regulatory sectors, CDC has developed a campaign to promote healthy contact lens wear and care practices that can help reduce the risk for eye infections and complications associated with poor contact lens hygiene.
Microbial keratitis is a serious, sometimes blinding, eye infection often associated with poor contact lens hygiene. CDC has published a report on the first estimate of the burden of keratitis, including microbial keratitis, and contact lens disorders in the United States, using data from national outpatient and emergency department databases (1). The report finds that episodes of keratitis and contact lens disorders result in an estimated 930,000 outpatient visits and 58,000 emergency department visits annually that cost $175 million in direct health care expenditures.
Established, modifiable risk factors for microbial keratitis, such as overnight contact lens wear, poor contact lens storage case hygiene, and infrequent storage case replacement (2,3), indicate that this serious and costly eye infection is largely preventable. As such, patient education about healthy contact lens wear and care practices is essential and warranted. Additional information on Contact Lens Health Week and the proper wear and care of contact lenses is available at http://www.cdc.gov/contactlenses.
Reference
- CDC. Estimated burden of keratitis—United States, 2010. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2014;63:1027–30.
- Szczotka-Flynn LB, Pearlman E, Ghannoum M. Microbial contamination of contact lenses, lens care solutions, and their accessories: a literature review. Eye Contact Lens 2010;36:116–29.
- Stapleton F, Edwards K, Keay L, et al. Risk factors for moderate and severe microbial keratitis in daily wear contact lens users. Ophthalmology 2012;119:1516–21.
Use of trade names and commercial sources is for identification only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services.
References to non-CDC sites on the Internet are
provided as a service to MMWR readers and do not constitute or imply
endorsement of these organizations or their programs by CDC or the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services. CDC is not responsible for the content
of pages found at these sites. URL addresses listed in MMWR were current as of
the date of publication.
All MMWR HTML versions of articles are electronic conversions from typeset documents.
This conversion might result in character translation or format errors in the HTML version.
Users are referred to the electronic PDF version (http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr)
and/or the original MMWR paper copy for printable versions of official text, figures, and tables.
An original paper copy of this issue can be obtained from the Superintendent of Documents, U.S.
Government Printing Office (GPO), Washington, DC 20402-9371;
telephone: (202) 512-1800. Contact GPO for current prices.
**Questions or messages regarding errors in formatting should be addressed to
mmwrq@cdc.gov.
