Home » Diseases » Fusarium Keratitis »

UI scientist must give documents to court

Mar 14, 2007 | Kelsey Beltramea | Daily Iowan

A UI researcher who observed a dangerous link between a contact-lens solution and a sight-threatening fungal infection must now submit her findings to the court.

On behalf of the Florida state court, Judge Patrick Grady ordered the clerk of court to issue a subpoena demanding Christine Sindt to hand over her documents.

Sindt, a UI clinical assistant professor of ophthalmology, noticed a problem with the contact-lens solution ReNu with MoistureLoc not long after its manufacturer, Bausch & Lomb, put it on retail shelves in November 2004.

Through her own informal study, she discovered that volunteers from her office who wore contacts that had soaked overnight in the solution had an "unusual" number of dead cells on their eyes. She theorized that the new preservative in the MoistureLoc formula was getting trapped in the lenses, causing damage to eye cells and increasing infection vulnerability.

Bausch & Lomb took the product off the market in April 2006; four months later, the Journal of the American Medical Association indicated several possible scenarios in which 164 MoistureLoc users nationwide contracted the fungus Fusarium keratitis.

Sindt's documents will be used in a lawsuit pending in Highlands County, Fla. against Bausch & Lomb, a Winter Haven, Fla. optical store, and three doctors.