Effectiveness Of Flushing With Water As First Aid Measure After Chemical Eye Contamination

We conducted a retrolective assessment of chemical eye injury outcomes to evaluate the efficiency of immediate flushing with water as first treatment.BASF's medical files were searched for the time period between January 1995 and December 2010 for incidents which involved eye contact with chemicals. From a total of 2,533 incidents, 157 were rated as "potentially severe". In a subset of 73, severe" cases visual acuity (VA) test results were available before, at the day of, and after the incident.The change over time of VA between first examination and accident (T1), and between accident and post-accident examination (T2) was examined using generalized linear models.In T1, the injured eyes showed an excess decline of VA immediately after treatment, compared to the non-injured eyes. In T2, the injured eyes showed improvement of VA.In the sub-group of bilateral injuries, the effect of duration between the VA tests was estimated. In T1, a decline of VA was observed, followed by improvement in T2, but neither change was statistically significant. Across the whole observation period, the observed change of VA was attributable to a time effect with increasing age, with no significant impact caused by the injury.The decline in visual acuity observed on the day of the accident was transient. An apparent recovery occurred between the accident and the next examination, independent of time. A long-term impact on eyesight was not evident on group basis. No cases of long-term VA impairment were identified in our population after individual review of the medical files.