DOCTORS HAVE PUBLISHED details about an unusual case study involving a teenage girl who got an eyeful from a fast-deploying airbag.
The 17-year-old girl had been a passenger in a car which was involved in a minor car crash on a motorway in the US when it rear-ended another vehicle.
No-one in the vehicle was injured, but the girl was brought to hospital after she complained of blurred vision. She also told doctors that she had the persistent feeling that there was something stuck in both her eyes.
Doctors used a special staining process to try and see what was wrong, and discovered something unexpected.
Over her right eye, they could see the imprint of the nylon mesh pattern of the airbag cover on her cornea, while her left eye had a slight tear in the surface. In other words: the airbag had deployed so quickly that she didn’t even have time to close her eyes.
The unusual case has been written up in the New England Journal of Medicine, which notes that there was a happy ending: the girl was given an ointment and the abrasions had completely healed within 24 hours.
While airbags save thousands of lives every year, they can sometimes also cause eye injuries in the 0.04 seconds it takes for them to deploy.
However, most of the eye injuries are minor and temporary.
“The thing to keep in mind here is that if you didn’t have the airbag and hit your head, it would be much worse,” said Dr Jonathan Trobe, who carried out the study, told LiveScience.com. “This is almost like an exchange. This is a little bit of a small price to pay”.
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