News Flash: Green lasers hurt your eyes (duh)

[Kirk]

On MPR they reported yesterday about a new study from Mayo stating that green lasers can cause eye damage.

Let me be the first to say . . . duh.

The lasers say right on them that they cause eye damage. I'm not sure this is all that surprising. I was a bit surprised to learn from the study however that a 30 second exposure to the retina caused visible damage but did not affect vision. Also, the effects seem to be temporary. I looked and looked but I could not find an online link to the story.

Anyone else have any luck? I want to know who signed up and said, sure, go ahead a shine that in my eye.

~Kirk

[radtki]

So far I've dug up an abstract...

http://archopht.ama-assn.org/cgi/conten ... 18/12/1686

[Kirk]

That report is from 2000. Aparently this is a new study. If you do a search on npr.org it comes up as it was clearly a link you could follow yesterday but those pages found in the search no longer conain the link. Weird.

~Kirk

[Chautauqua]

Mayo's got all kinds of stuff about laser safety on the internal publications but I couldn't find anything released recently for the public.

[Starforce2]

I alsways assume dlazer damage was permenent right off. Same goes for the red ones.

[Jon Hickman]

We manufacture laser based sensors, so I've picked up lots of laser info over the years. As Cliff would say, "It's a little known fact" but the laser classifications were determined using chimps. The testers would shine lasers of varying power into the eyes of the chimps and watch for damage. They then calculated the power level and exposure needed to cause (or in the case of Class 1 lasers) or not cause damage and took approximately 1/10 of that figure for human eye safety.

As we shine our lasers into the night sky to show others the wonders we see, we are standing on the shoulders of all those poor blind chimps!