I cannot believe while our country has such problems with our borders and the Senate is up there doing nothing that Dewine has to concentrate on this. Hey Dewine wake up. Your Days in the Senate are few. Next year buddy you will be out on the Streets. No job for you in the State of ohio for you.

PRESS CONFERENCE: PASSAGE OF CONTACT LENS BILL

Contact: Jeff Sadosky
Monday, October 31, 2005


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I am pleased to be here today to celebrate the passage of our contact lens bill. I want to thank all of you for your dedication to this important issue and for your work in getting this bill through Congress. I’d especially like to thank my colleagues -- Senator Kennedy, Senator Enzi, Representative Boozman, and Representative Waxman -- for their dedication to this issue.

With the President’s signature on this bill, we will ensure that all contact lenses -- whether they are lenses used to correct vision or lenses used for cosmetic purposes -- satisfy the same regulatory safety requirements for approval. Right now, non-corrective contact lenses, such as decorative lenses that change eye color or have some design on them, are regulated under the Food and Drug Administration’s cosmetic authority. That means that the FDA does not review them for safety or effectiveness before they are sold to the public. And, it means that people can buy them just about anywhere – in a convenience store or a gas station and not in the doctor’s office like you would for a pair of corrective contact lenses. This lack of FDA review and lack of established safety standards can lead to the marketing of lenses that are neither safe nor suitable for wearing.

Our bill requires the FDA to treat all contact lenses as medical devices, meaning that the non-corrective lenses will be reviewed before they are marketed and before they are accessible to young people. And, these types of lenses will be available to people only through a doctor’s office -- not over the counter at the 7-11.

The passage of our bill is very timely. As we celebrate Halloween, children and adults around the country will use non-corrective contact lenses to accentuate their costumes. However, just as we would check a child’s candy after they’ve gone trick-or-treating, we also need to make sure that our children are not putting their eyesight at risk.

An article in the medical journal Eye & Contact Lens by Dr. Tim Steinemann, who is here with us today, describes the cases of six people injured by the sale of unregulated colored contact lenses. As the article points out, four of the six patients reside in the greater Cleveland, Ohio, area. This obviously concerns me. But what concerns me more is that three of the five patients were teenagers.

One of these teenagers actually purchased her lenses from a video rental store. Shortly after wearing the colored contact lenses, she was urgently admitted to a Cleveland hospital where it was determined that the vision in her left eye had become so poor that she could only make out hand motions. She stayed in the ICU for four days as her doctor feared that she might actually lose her eye. In an effort to restore her vision, she underwent a corneal transplant. Nearly two years after the infection started, her vision had not been fully restored. For the rest of her life, this young girl will be at risk for rejection of the transplant, the development of cataracts, and glaucoma.

This type of injury can, and hopefully very soon, will be prevented. Again, thank you for your hard work and support, and I look forward to the implementation of this legislation.