European Journal of Molecular & Clinical Medicine

Background :Gloves are used during all patient-care activities that involve exposure to
blood and all other body fluid, during contact precautions and outbreak situations.. The
non sterile gloves are appropriate for examination and non surgical procedures and sterile
gloves for surgical procedures. In developing countries like India where the money set
aside for public health is less than 1% of the gross domestic product (GDP), routine use of
disposable materials like gloves for examining patients as well as for minor surgical
procedures can be a drain on the resources. The use of surgical gloves when not indicated
represents a waste of resources and increases the treatment cost. Recently there have been
studies indicating use of clean examination gloves while performing minor oral surgical
procedures. So we decided to conduct study to ascertain microbiological quality of
surgical and clean examination gloves in oral surgery to determine if there was a
significant difference in bacterial colony forming count (CFUs) and evidence of post
operative infection between two types of the gloves.
Material and method: A randomised comparative double-blind study was conducted on
100 patients requiring minor oral surgical procedures like extractions of multiple teeth
using sterile or clean examination gloves. The microbiological specimens were collected
from gloves by saline dilution method and incubated for 7 days on trypticase soy agar.The
number of colonies were counted and expressed as total colony forming units. The patients
in both groups were examined for assessment of post operative complications like infection
to compare the co relation between no of CFU s and infection rate.
Statistical analysis:All results were tabulated and statistically analyzed using SPSS
version 20.
Results: The intergroup comparison of the pre- and postoperative bacterial counts (CFUs)
with the t-test paired showed highly significant 1 percent significance difference (P < 0.01)
. The patients in both groups were examined for assessment of post operative complications
like infection to compare the co relation between no of CFU s and infection rate and was
found that none of the patients were found to be infected at 7th day recall in both groups. .
Conclusion:It was concluded that minor oral surgical procedures can be carried out with
clean examination gloves, without any increased the rate of infection