Doctors say wearing contacts for long periods of time provides the perfect breeding ground for bacteria (Picture: COLLECT)

A Taiwanese student has gone blind after she left a pair of disposable contact lenses in her eyes for six months.

Lian Kao’s eyeballs were eaten away by a microscopic bug when the 23-year-old wore the contacts without once taking them out and cleaning them – even wearing them while swimming.

It allowed a single-cell amoeba to breed in the conditions between the lens and her eyeball and eat away at her cornea – eventually costing her her sight.

Horrified doctors at Taipei’s Wan Fang hospital explained that the lack of oxygen reaching the eyeball allowed tiny wounds to open which bacteria could then infect.




‘Contact lens wearers are a high-risk group that can easily be exposed to eye diseases,’ director of ophthalmology Wu Jiang-liang told MailOnline.

The acanthamoeba slowly ate away at the girl’s eyeball through tiny open wounds (Picture: Alamy)

‘The girl should have thrown the contact lenses away after a month but instead she overused them and has now permanently damaged her corneas.’

Doctors said that the case was a severe and tragic example of a young student under pressure from work who neglected basic hygiene.

It is not recommended to wear contacts for more than eight hours a day, and as well as being regularly cleaned they should be removed when swimming and washing.

The student was diagnosed with acanthamoeba keratitis, a condition which, though rare, is more common in summer.