Girl who was in a car accident left with a mesh imprint from airbag on her eyeballs because it activated so quickly she didn't have time to close them

JOEL CHRISTIE

dailymail.co.uk

Doctors have determined that the serious eye injuries sustained by a 17-year-old girl in a car crash were actually from the airbag.

The teen, from Michigan, was a passenger in a car that was rear-ended.

She was wearing a seatbelt at the time of the accident and did not suffer any injuries.

However, after being taken to hospital as a precaution, she complained of having blurry vision.

Doctors reviewed her eyesight, according to a study in The New England Journal of Medicine, and found she was 20/20 in the right eye and 20/25 in the left.

They then put a fluorescent dye into her cornea in order to view the eyes through a blue filter.

It was then found that the mesh pattern from the airbag had been imprinted on both of her eyes.

The girl's left eye also suffered a corneal abrasion.

'When we looked at her under a magnified view, we could see that there was this very unusual imprint on the surface of the cornea … a rather dramatic-looking picture of the imprint of the nylon mesh pattern of the airbag cover,' Dr. Jonathan Trobe, an ophthalmologist at the University of Michigan, told Live Science.

'It’s quite interesting to see that the airbag deployed so quickly that she didn’t have time to close her eyes.'

Fortunately, she was given an erythromuycin ointment that cleared the problem after two weeks.

The Blaze reported that General Motors recently recalled about 33,000 Chevrolet Cruze cars for potentially defective airbags after a woman went blind in one eye due to a deployment gone wrong.

Other car makers with airbags supplied by Takata — Honda, Mazda and Nissan — also issued recalls due to the possibility they could explode.