AAO members join in rebuilding New Orleans — with eye safety in mind

NEW ORLEANS — Over a 3-day period, more than 600 ophthalmologists will join together to participate in the American Academy of Ophthalmology's EyeBuild project, a partnership with the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity to build houses in the residential areas hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina.

The volunteers will wear protective eyewear to highlight the results of a new survey that found that nearly half of eye injuries occur in the home and 75% of all injured did not wear protective eyewear.

EyeBuild volunteers are among the more than 20,000 estimated attendees of the Academy's Annual Meeting in New Orleans, November 10 through 13.

"The [AAO] developed EyeBuild in response to numerous requests from our members for a community service project in New Orleans," said H. Dunbar Hoskins, Jr., MD, executive vice president of the AAO, in a press release from the organization. "Our past meetings here have always been wonderful events, thanks to the joie de vivre that makes the city unique. We wanted to contribute to rebuilding New Orleans as one way of saying thank you for all the hospitality the city has shown us through the years."

The site chosen for EyeBuild will be in St. Bernard Parish, one of the communities most devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which is located to the southeast of New Orleans.

The AAO's annual Eye Injury Snapshot Project, a partnership with the American Society of Ocular Trauma (ASOT), highlights the importance of guarding eyes against trauma during construction and home repair, as well as many other everyday activities.

Some 475 cases were chronicled in this year's Eye Injury Snapshot project. The project surveyed ophthalmologists, as well as emergency, pediatric, and family physicians who treated eye injuries during a one-week period in May 2007. Most eye injury patients were males between the ages of 18 and 45 whose trauma was the result of an accident. Significantly, 75% of those whose injuries were recorded in this year's project were not wearing protective eye wear, even though doctors concluded that more than half of the accidents could have been avoided by taking that simple precaution.

The results of the 2007 Eye Injury Snapshot project are comparable to those from the 2006 survey. Some of the major findings from the 2007 project include the following:

75% of injury victims were not wearing protective eyewear;
84% of injuries resulted from accidents;
49% of injuries occurred in the home;
41% of injuries happened between 12 p.m. and 6 p.m.;
87% of injured patients had previously normal ocular histories; and
73% of patients were expected to fully recover.