ReNu investigators in Singapore honored
The Singapore Health Minister has honored a team of scientists who worked to investigate the link between Bausch & Lomb’s ReNu with MoistureLoc contact lens solution and a serious form of eye infection. He credits the team for its courage and dedication in taking on the pharmaceutical giant.
“Certainly when you decide to do something like this, you’re taking on a very big multi-national corporation and as I said, they’re armed with teams of [scientists and lawyers],” Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan says. “And if the advisory was premature or without basis, or could not be proven, I’m quite sure there’ll be a legal suit on our table.”
Doctors in Singapore first noticed the link between ReNu with MoistureLoc and the Fusarium keratitis infection in June 2005. Because of their investigations into the ReNu eye infection risk, MoistureLoc was pulled from stores in Singapore in February 2006—two months before it was pulled from U.S. shelves and three months before the worldwide ReNu recall.
Donald Tan of the Singapore National Eye Center credits the team of scientists with saving the eyesight of many contact lens wearers in the country. “I think it was speed which saved a lot of patients,” Tan says. “In the U.S., one-third of the patients actually required corneal transplants. So it’s very severe, and a lot of it is because of delayed diagnosis. For us, we have five transplants out of 68 cases. So the severity was much less. So our patients did not suffer as much. They had better visual outcomes because we got into it earlier.”