Dr. Christensen’s October article on operating gloves resurrected one of the greatest non-scientific, nontechnological and nonbeneficial changes in the history of dentistry. In fact, it drove many excellent dentists out of the profession because of allergies to latex. And sadly, the whole barrier phenomenon was a fraud and a charade, foisted upon the health professions by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which was running out of ways to scare people and justify its existence—and found the Acer case the perfect ploy.
The facts are these: U.S. dentists performed for decades, and without gloves, more than 1 billion dental procedures each year in the course of more than 500 million dental visits, with no human immunodeficiency virus transmissions reported!
We are left with one health care worker (Dr. David Acer) who defies staggering odds and infects a few people. And finally the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is admitting, after its investigations, to the incontestable anomaly of the case.
As a profession, we need to be deeply concerned when public health policy is set, not by scientists, but by political operatives and special interests with axes to grind and agendas to fulfill, all supported by the journalistic rhetorical fashion of the moment, elevating another chimerical danger. All of which exploits the lemming behavior of a vast majority of people, including acquiescing health professionals.
Because of these sensational, nonscientific charges spewed out by the media, the dentist/AIDS thing was just another paradigm (along with alar, asbestos, lead, mercury and others) of the hypochondria that grips an affluent society frightened by shadows on the wall.
