Thousands of consumers who have suffered at the hands of Bausch & Lomb’s ReNu with MoistureLoc have finally received some of the answers they have been looking for. Federal disease control experts and leading eye doctors have formally concluded that ReNu With MoistureLoc from Bausch & Lomb was the only contact lens solution contributing to an outbreak of potentially blinding fungal eye infections earlier this year.
The research report challenged Bausch & Lomb’s argument that a major factor in the outbreak was customers’ failure to properly clean their lenses and regularly replace the storage solution.
According to an article in the New York Times, the infections showed up in Asia last year and peaked in the United States this spring, shortly after Bausch withdrew MoistureLoc from the domestic market on April 13. Bausch announced a worldwide recall a month later.
“Practicing good contact lens hygiene is a prudent and common-sense measure for all contact lens wearers, irrespective of contact lens solution used,” Dr. Douglas C. Chang, a fungal disease specialist at the Centers for Disease Control, who was lead author on the report, said in an e-mail interview. “However, the most important message for contact lens wearers is to stop using MoistureLoc, and throw out any MoistureLoc solution purchased before the recall.”
The medical journal data analysis was based on 164 confirmed cases of Fusarium fungus eye infections in the United States from the beginning of June 2005 to the end of June this year. The analysis concluded that just over one-third of the patients had suffered serious enough damage to one or both eyes to require corneal transplants.
