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Dental Infection Control Sucks

June 11, 2010 By Trish Walraven Leave a Comment

So maybe it was the equipment allowing backflow into patients mouths during extractions (blecch), or inadequate sterilization measures, but whatever the case, Hepatitis B has been officially contracted during dental procedures.

A free, volunteer-staffed program offered at a West Virginia high school found that three patients and two clinicians came down with Hepatitis B viruses that were tested and matched at a molecular level, indicating that the infections came from a common source.

All people involved at the Mission of Mercy clinic last summer were mailed letters last week encouraging that they be tested for the virus. The testing is being paid for by the state of West Virginia. (Insert your best West Virginia joke here. And then be ashamed of yourself for doing it).

If you have any response to this news, it should be to check your own infection control systems, to be sure that your high speed evacuation is up to par, that you aren’t just wiping down handpieces, and that every patient is treated with those universal precautions that were so important in dental school.

After all, you wouldn’t want this happening in an elite state, like Washington. DBSmile

Filed Under: Operative Dentistry Tagged With: dental handpieces, Dental virus transmission, Hepatitis B, Infection control, scandals, volunteer dentistry

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DentalBuzz explores rising trends in dentistry with its own slant. The speed at which new products and ideas enter the dental field can often outpace our ability to understand just exactly the direction in which we are heading. But somehow, by being a little less serious about dentistry and dental care, we might get closer to making sense of it all.

So yeah, a tongue-in-cheek pun would fit really nicely here, but that would be in bad taste. Never mind, it just happened anyways. Stop reading sidebars already and click on some content instead.

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