How strange it is to look back on the past four years and realize the remarkable changes that have occurred in our approach to contact lens wear and care, primarily as a result of a new entity, Acanthamoeba keratitis. We made the first association between contact lens wear and Acanthamoeba keratitis in 1984, which until then was thought to be very rare and due to trauma with a contaminated foreign body.1 At that time the accepted theory for contact lens wearers who developed Acanthamoeba keratitis was that patients had been exposed to contaminated water from a hot tub, swimming pool, or lake while wearing contact lenses.2 We posed the following questions: Could it be that the contact lenses were already contaminated with Acanthamoeba when they were put on the eye? Could it also be that certain contact lens solutions were more prone
See also pp 1196 and 1202.