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With the arrival of summer, we run to the shelves of drugstores and supermarkets to get creams that protect us from the harmful radiation of the sun and with mosquito repellants to avoid their annoying bites.
Protecting our skin has become a daily gesture that we have internalized well, but we often forget the importance of protecting our eyes from the same solar radiation.
And if ours protect them little or not correctly, those of children even worse.
It is enough to take a short walk along the shore of any beach, to realize that we can count on the fingers of our hands the children who wear sunglasses.
Beware of chlorine
The water in swimming pools usually contains a high concentration of chlorine, something necessary to make them a safe environment free of bacteria or algae, but this compound
can have negative effects on our eyes.
The most common is the so-called chemical conjunctivitis, which causes irritation and itching.
For this reason, it is highly recommended to
use swimming goggles
while we are in the water, as well as to
wash the eye by dropping a couple of drops of artificial tears when leaving
it.
Attention to dry eye
Our eyes are covered by a tear film that must remain stable and with the appropriate composition of salts to fulfill its protective and hydrating function.
But
when it comes into
contact with seawater, and especially swimming pool water,
that film is destabilized and easily destroyed.
The consequence of all this is
a dry, irritated, stinging eye with blurred vision.
Tips to avoid dry eye and conjunctivitis in the sea and the pool
Avoid swimming with contact lenses on.
Protect your eyes with swimming goggles.
At the slightest sign of a red eye, get out of the water and wait for them to recover.
Be careful with sunscreens, avoid getting into the eyes.
After each bath, apply a couple of drops of artificial tears to each eye.
Sunglasses, essential
Essential and approved.
Would you buy a mask at a street market?
Or an
airbag
for your car on the top blanket?
However, every day many people do acquire sunglasses without any type of approval, without being aware of the danger to their eye health that this entails.
It is even worse to use non-approved sunglasses than not to wear them,
since when we do not wear them our pupil contracts, thus making it difficult for the sun's ultraviolet radiation to pass into the internal structures of the eye.
How do sunglasses protect us?
The lenses of approved sunglasses have two layers:
one that gives it its characteristic dark color (the tint layer) and another that acts by preventing the sun's ultraviolet radiation from penetrating the eye (the filter layer).
However, the non-approved ones lack this second filter layer, but thanks to the tinted layer they make our pupil dilate and here lies the real danger since they allow harmful radiation to penetrate with total freedom.
What are the consequences of not wearing sunglasses?
In both children and adults, in the short term the most common would be an
inflammation of the cornea (keratitis)
with blurred vision, photophobia, a foreign body sensation and pain, although a corneal burn can occur in more extreme cases.
In the long term we would be talking about the
early appearance of cataracts and macular degeneration,
the leading cause of blindness in people over fifty years of age.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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