Infection Prevention – Is your Dentist doing enough?

CLINICAL CONTENT WRITTEN & REVIEWED BY CLOVE CLINICAL TEAM

Last Modified: October 18, 2018

FACT CHECKED

Every procedure in Dentistry, no matter how trivial, involves certain exposure to Saliva & Blood, either directly or through potentially infectious materials.

Dental drill, which is essentially an Air driven Turbine and the Ultrasonic Scaler which employs ultrasonic frequency vibrations, while doing scaling; have one thing in common. Both create an Aerosol around the patients’ face, consisting of water vapours mixed with patients’ saliva and blood, which is a definitive source of cross-contamination from one patient to another.

Very few dental surgeons resort to autoclaving the Dental Drillls or the scalers to achieve complete sterilisation; thereby creating an inconceivable risk for the spread of infection from the dental clinic. Very few patients have this awareness, thereby, the negligence of the doctor goes un-noticed. The autoclavable Drill hand piece/Scaler are expensive and if they have to be sterilised properly, the clinician needs extra sets of these expensive tools, to cater for the sterilisation cycle, after every patient, which is easily about 40-45 minutes. And hence an unsuspecting patient may never come to know what kind of infections he maybe exposed to if the dental clinic is not following the 4-step sterilisation stringently.

Clove takes pride in maintaining highest degree of asepsis and sterilisation similar to what is followed in the best USA practices and guarantees ‘Zero Infection clinics’, certified by the spore testing laboratory of Mumbai certifying month on month, that every Clove Clinic is ‘Free from Infection’.

By:-
Lt. Gen. (Dr) Vimal Arora; PVSM, AVSM, VSM & Bar (Retd.)
BDS, MDS (Prosthodontist & Implantologist), FDS, RCPS (UK)
Chief Clinical Officer, Clove Dental
Former Director General Dental Services, Indian Army Dental Corps
Ex-Member, Dental Council of India
Former Honorary Dental Surgeon to the President of India