Over the past few years, community-based clinical teaching/outreach teaching programs have been established in many dental schools in the United Kingdom. One such program was developed by Cardiff University at the local St. David's Hospital in 2002. Students visit this unit throughout their dental school program--as an assistant/observer initially, but gaining a significant amount of clinical o...

BACKGROUND Dental practices use disinfectants or line cleaners to flush dental unit wastewater lines to minimize odor generation, remove solid waste particles and remove biofilms in dental unit water lines (DUWLs). METHODS The authors evaluated 47 disinfectants or line cleaners for their potential to release mercury from amalgam waste. They prepared each product concentration according to the...

BACKGROUND The high numbers of heterotrophic microorganisms that have been cultured from dental unit waterlines (DUWs) have raised concern that this water may exceed suggested limits for heterotrophic plate counts (HPCs). The main purpose of this investigation was to examine HPC variability in DUWs and to examine in detail the effect of laboratory processing of water samples on HPC values. ME...

AIM How an appropriate safety syringe was chosen, how the change-over to it was achieved and what outcome measures were used to measure the effectiveness of this change. INTRODUCTION One third of all reported sharps injuries in dental practice are due to the use of non disposable dental syringes with most injuries being sustained during removal and disposal of the disposable needle from the n...

Introduction. Legionella is frequently detected in Dental Unit Waterlines (DUWLs). Although such a high occurrence is not necessarily associated with high risk for Legionnaire’s disease among patients and staff, it is prudent to monitor DUWLs for Legionella periodically. Since this procedure is long and expensive, surrogate markers are frequently

Student performance was compared on written and psychomotor skill tests of freshman dental students receiving conventional lectures versus the same lectures containing interactive components using TurningPoint, a wireless audience response system (ARS). The research design was a controlled crossover study with seventy-seven freshman dental students conducted in a preclinical operative dentistry...

Dental-unit water systems (DUWS) harbor bacterial biofilms, which may serve as a haven for pathogens. The aim of this study was to investigate the microbial load of water from DUWS in general dental practices and the biofouling of DUWS tubing. Water and tube samples were taken from 55 dental surgeries in southwestern England. Contamination was determined by viable counts on environmentally sele...