For Pete's Sake, Don't Sleep or Swim in Your Contact Lenses

Contact lenses are so ubiquitous — about 41 million people in the U.S. wear them — that it's easy to forget that they're actual medical devices, with small but real medical risks.

An analysis published Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention examined 1,075 reports of corneal infections related to contact lens use from the Food and Drug Administration's Medical Device Report database over a decade.

To be sure, these were likely the worst of the worst of these types of infection and can't be considered representative of contact lens infections overall. But of those reports, almost 20 percent described a patient with injuries resulting in decreased vision or a corneal scar, or requiring a corneal transplant. The study was published in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report....
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/08/18/490490227/for-pete-s-sake-don-t-sleep-or-swim-in-your-contact-lenses?ft=nprml&f=1001