Laser pens...?!
Question:
Laser pens...?
How exactly does it damage your eyes? I have heard they have been banned from school as they can damage your eyes. My son is 12 and has a laser pen. When I told him it was dangerous to shine it in your eye he said that he tried it and it didn't do anything (typical!). I have told him I will take the pen away if he can't use it responsibly, but I need to be able to tell him exactly why he shouldn't do this.
Answers:
From: http://www.laserinstitute.org/publicatio...
Kids will be kids of course, and young people are doing the same thing in schools across the country today using laser pointers. The difference is laser light from pointers poses a much greater risk to the eye than the relatively primitive method used by children in days past. The energy a pointer can direct into the eye is many times brighter than staring directly at the sun.
Laser pointers are not toys! This lesson was brought home to a small school district in Wisconsin in the fall of 1996. A 16-year-old girl was illuminated in the eye from the beams of laser pointers used as pranks. She experienced two momentary exposures, one while performing a pom pom routine and again while walking down a hallway. She reported the incidents to her parents, adding that after the first exposure, everything looked green; after the second, she could temporarily not see out of her right eye.
While this is one of the most dramatic examples to date, there are numerous reports of similar, momentary exposures across the U.S. and the U.K. While it seems clear such brief exposures can cause only brief effects, there is no reason to ever shine a pointer towards someone. The Laser Institute of America and the American Academy of Ophthalmology have also received reports of people exposed for longer amounts of time, including two verified retinal injuries caused by intentionally staring into pointers. For more information about these incidents, AAO?s web site, www.eyenet.org, should be consulted.