Wearing Contact Lens Largest Risk Factor in Eye Infections, Says CDC Study.

Each year, Americans make nearly a million doctor visits for eye infections (primarily keratitis), costing $175 million. That’s the estimate from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) first of its kind study. The largest risk factor: Wearing contacts. CDC analyzed national databases of outpatient care centers and emergency rooms to develop the first national estimates of how much keratitis occurs in the United States. CDC experts found that Americans made an estimated 930,000 visits to doctor’s offices and outpatient clinics and 58,000 emergency room visits annually due to eye infections. Women were slightly more likely to be affected than men, accounting for 63 percent of office visits and about 55 percent of emergency room visits. The condition was spread relatively evenly across age groups. The report was published November 13 in CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Great website to send your patients: Click here.

November 17 through 21, 2014, marks the first annual Contact Lens Health Week. To celebrate the week, CDC has developed a campaign to promote eye health, in collaboration with doctors, public health, eye care industry, and regulatory partners. By focusing on the best ways to wear and care for contact lenses, CDC hopes to help reduce the risk of eye infections and complications associated with poor contact lens hygiene in the estimated 38 million Americans who wear contact lenses.  Read more.

For your own Contact Lens Health Week Toolkit from the CDC, click here.

CDC Recommends Steps for Monitoring Nation's Vision Health

Prevent Blindness America reports the following:

Vision loss is a serious public health problem in the United States and will get worse in the next 30 years due to the aging of the population, increasing in chronic diseases affecting the eye and vision, and changing demographics of the US population. There are significant variations among demographic groups in vision outcomes. Therefore, the vision and eye care communities have identified the reduction of population disparities in visual loss and in access to eye care services as top public health priorities in Healthy People 2020.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) convened an expert panel of 14 national and international experts, to identify action steps and priorities to strengthen national and state surveillance systems  in assessing and monitoring disparities in eye health, vision loss, and access to eye care over time and responding to national, state, and local needs. The product of the meeting is eight papers that are published in a supplement at the American Journal of Ophthalmology.

The panel members agreed on how such a surveillance system would work and what the minimal content of such a system might entail. A vision surveillance system needs to:

1. Link data collection and analyses with ongoing public health interventions to improve eye health disparities.
2. Effectively assess vision loss and utilization of eye care.
3. Include defined populations to assess the disparities in vision loss and in utilization of eye care services.
4. Include and sustain ophthalmic/vision measurements and question components within national surveys.
5. Be forged among federal agencies and other stakeholders to monitor the nation's eye health and eye care utilization for trends in disparity.

CDC Looking for Eye Health Care Professionals

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is now accepting applications from health care practitioners for its Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) Program. The EIS is a unique two-year, post-graduate training program of service and on-the-job learning for health professionals interested in the practice of applied epidemiology, according to the CDC. Each year, 70 to 80 people are selected as EIS officers and assigned to the CDC, or to state or local health departments, where they conduct epidemiologic investigations, research, and public health surveillance. Read more.