A 12-year-old boy suffered serious and irreversible eye damage in Austria after playing with a laser pointer.
“Never in the eyes! The parental injunction takes on its full meaning … In Austria, a 12-year-old boy inflicted serious and irreversible eye injuries while playing with a laser pointer. He suffers from a loss of vision of 60% in both eyes, following “a reverberation effect while having fun aiming at a mirror”, according to a statement produced by the Austrian hospital where he been taken care of.
No treatment
“The retina has been deeply affected, irreversibly. There is no therapy for this type of injury, ”said the establishment in a statement. The child complains that he always has a large black spot in his field of vision.
The young patient had purchased the object from a major Internet sales site. The laser belonged to category 2, authorized by the European Union. Indeed, lasers are classified into four categories according to their power – and therefore, their dangerousness. Class 1 covers “intrinsically safe lasers”. Class 2 designates lasers with visible radiation (between 0.4 and 0.7 µm) with a maximum power of 1milliwatt. Only these two categories are authorized by the European Union.
Standards not always respected
And yet, they are not without danger – the proof. The Austrian establishment points out that class 2 lasers can “cause serious damage to the retina in less than 0.25 seconds”. This quarter of a second corresponds to the time it takes to close the eyelids in the event of light attack (eyelid reflex). If the light beam reaches the retina before this eyelid reflex is triggered, then it can actually burn the retina.
And you still have to be able to differentiate between the different categories… All are available on the Internet – even those reserved for professional and industrial use. “Externally, unauthorized dangerous laser pointers are indistinguishable from others”, underlines the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health. It is therefore necessary to refer to the indications appearing on the package… which may just as well be fanciful. “Manual devices do not always correspond to the standards in force and the limit values are sometimes greatly exceeded. », Warns the Office.
Several voices have therefore denounced an obsolete law. Thus, le National Union of Ophthalmologists of France has been calling for several years for legislative change, and the prohibition of “any laser that could cause eye damage”.
The union recalls that “the literature notes several cases of patients who have permanently lost good visual acuity in the eye which fixed the laser beam. This resulted in scotoma and retinal lesion clearly visible on fluorescein angiography ”.
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