Keratitis and coloured contact lenses. ECLSO online petition.

Dear colleagues,

A recently published study by the French Study Group for Contact Lens related Microbial Keratitis has revealed that the incidence of complications related to coloured contact lenses is twelve times higher than with corrective lenses. This is certainly caused by free availability in supermarkets of such lenses, which are sold to the public without any professional fitting and without the basic hygienic advice provided by a health professional. Contrary to the corrective contact lenses, the coloured non corrective lenses are in fact excluded from the European directive about medical devices, because stricto sensu they do not correspond to the definition of such device.

All our efforts to obtain a stricter regulation as to their distribution have remained without success. A new European directive about medical devices is presently being studied and we may hope that a petition signed by a large number of ophthalmologists might give more weight to our demand.

Signing this petition online through the ECLSO website (www.eclso.eu) will only take a minute of your time, so we kindly ask you to immediately support our action for improved health protection of the consumers.

Dr. Florence Malet

President of the ECLSO