YouTube This Internet craze may have started with a music video by the Japanese band Born, which features eyeball licking.

We hope this news isn’t an eye-opener for anyone, but licking people’s eyeballs may transmit pink eye.

The revelation went viral this week after the Chinese news site Shanghaiist reported that Japanese schoolchildren are getting aroused by licking each other’s eyeballs – an act formally known as oculolinctus – and now schools across the country are noticing an uptick in cases of stys (an eyelid infection) and pink eye (conjunctivitis). Teachers noticed something was amiss when students started showing up wearing eye patches, one middle school teacher wrote on the blog Naver Matome (translated by Japan Crush). Shanghaiist believes the trend may derive from a music video by the Japanese band Born – which features a woman licking a man’s eyeball, beginning at the 3:30 mark.

The fad has spread across the globe, from Japan to the U.S. Virgin Islands, and you can find photos, cartoons and videos of the fetish all over Tumblr and YouTube. Even The Huffington Post tried it and then interviewed ophthalmologists, who warned of potential health risks like blindness, corneal abrasions and eye chlamydia.

“The bacteria in the mouth is nothing like the bacteria in the eyeball, which is why we no longer recommend people lick contact lenses to moisten them,” Dr. Phillip Rizzuto, an American Academy of Ophthalmology spokesman, told the news website.

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