ELEPHANT FITTED WITH A CONTACT LENS

An elephant at a Dutch zoo has become the first in Europe to be fitted with a contact lens. Win Thida, a 45-year-old Asian elephant residing at Amsterdam’s Artis Zoo, injured her eye during an altercation with a fellow elephant that left her with a scratched cornea. The scratch caused her eye to continue watering and she had trouble keeping it open due to increased glare associated with a damaged cornea.

The zoo called in veterinarian Anne-Marie Verbruggen who has had experience fitting horses with contact lenses to help Win Thida’s cornea from becoming infected. This was Verbruggen’s first attempt at fitting an elephant with a contact. "The main difficulty was her height," Verbruggen told the Irish Times. "Elephants can't lie down for long before their immense weight impairs their breathing, so I used a ladder to get close enough. It wasn't ideal, but it worked. She seemed happier straight away."

Win Thida had to be anaesthetized in a standing position and was required to train daily with Verbruggen for weeks in preparation for the procedure. It took tall ladder and a support team to complete to process. The contact lens was fitted in under an hour and Win Thida’s cornea should now be able to heal properly. Win Thida was born in Burma in 1967 and arrived in the Netherlands in 1989. She has resided at the Artis Zoo since 2004.

Welcome to the future. 

It is a bizarre thought to think that we are living in the future. It is stories like this one that makes you realise how far we have come as human species and all the amazing places we are going. The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is currently developing at their Washington-based Innovega iOptics laboratory, contact lenses which allow a wearer to view virtual and augmented reality images in real time. Instead of oversized virtual reality helmets, digital images are projected onto tiny full-colour displays that are very close to the eye, which allows the user to focus simultaneously on objects that are close up and far way. The goal is for the lenses to be used for reading short emails, text messages and news. In the future possibilities are pretty amazing. It could act as your GPS while you’re driving, help you look up information, and even augment reality.

Developed as part of the Soldier Centric Imaging via Computational Cameras program, the objective of the lens is to develop novel imaging capabilities and explore joint designs of hardware and software that gives warfighters access to systems that greatly enhance their awareness, security and survivability. Innovega, which demonstrated the technology at their consumer electronics show in January, hopes to have a consumer version of the iOptik system ready by late 2014.The engineers are saying the lenses could also be helpful in monitoring blood sugar levels in the body and sending out a signal in case of an emergency. Let’s imagine what the future could look like: the battery could be in an earpiece, where you could control the lens display by using voice recognition, like Siri. Your computer/phone and additional controls could be in your watch.

The lens is being created by integrating control and communication circuits, and miniature antennas into a conventional contact lens using custom-built optoelectronic components. Those components will eventually include hundreds of LEDs, which will form images in front of the eye, such as words, charts, and photographs. Much of the hardware is semitransparent. In all likelihood, a separate, portable device will relay displayable information to the lens’s control circuit, which will operate the optoelectronics in the lens.

"So we already have a built-in market. We envision that people who pick up their lenses every six months or so might switch to these lenses”.

BioTrue for contact lenses – inspired by the biology of your eyes. 

BioTrue is the latest advance in contact lens care, developed by Bausch + Lomb. The development of BioTrue has been inspired by the biology of your eyes and works with your natural tears to improve comfort and cleanliness of your contact lenses.

BioTrue has the following three innovations:

1. It contains a natural lubricant found in your tears (called hyaluranon), which has been shown to last on the eye for up to 20 hours, giving great comfort all day long.
2. It matches the pH of your tears. Almost all other solutions are a little acidic as the main purpose of solution is to kill the bacteria that can adhere to your contact lenses and cause irritation or infection. By having the same pH of your tears, BioTrue is less likely to sting your eyes or cause irritation.
3. It keeps lenses cleaner by managing the normal proteins found in tears to reduce build up on lenses. Normal (‘good’) proteins can sometimes change their form and become ‘bad proteins’ that build up on contact lenses making them uncomfortable to wear and increasing the risk of infection. BioTrue manages ‘good proteins’ to keep them in the natural state and stop them becoming ‘bad proteins’ (like the difference between good and bad cholesterol).

In the past, contact lens solutions have been designed to first and foremost kill germs that build up on the lenses, and then to be as compatible as possible with the surface of the eye. BioTrue is the other way around- it has been designed to mimic the natural cleaning and cushioning function of your tears while also maintaining excellent disinfection (germ killing) capabilities.

Here at Gerry & Johnson Optometrists, we believe in delivering you the very best eyecare while also keeping you up to date with the latest in cutting edge technology and vision care products available in Australia. We will be happy to discuss BioTrue more with you when you next visit us, and now have it in stock on advanced release, ready for immediate use to take your contact lenses to new levels of comfort and hygiene.

Be one of the first contact lens wearers in Australia to experience BioTrue!

Conveniently order your contact lenses via www.gjo.com.au

We are excited to introduce you to our one-step online contact lens ordering! With the click on the icon on our home page, you can fill in your details and we will contact you when your lenses arrive. We take care of all of the details for you, and guarantee 100% order accuracy and next day delivery*.
You can still call us to order your lenses, or use our SMS reminder system if you prefer. Our one-step online ordering now offers you an easy way to ensure you never run out of contact lenses, at any time of day.

*if collected in our practice and ordered before 12pm, for most contact lenses