KEEPING THE PRESSURE ON THE ADA
Robert L. Miller, D.D.S.
Pleasant Hill, CA
To the Editor:
Your CleanRooms articles and editorials about contamination in dentistry have been a delight. Please keep up the pressure. It is important that criticism come from outside the dental profession. A few of us have tried to correct the problems, doing research to define the problems and offering valid methods to eliminate the problems. We have not made a dent in the problems found in almost every dental office in the United States.
The contaminated oil in handpieces can be readily corrected by simply steam sterilizing the handpiece. Who is so dimly lit that they cannot understand that? Chlorine water-line decontamination and delivery of germicidal chlorinated water is fundamental to First World countries. That is also obvious. Perhaps the ADA has never heard of Snow`s Broad Street Pump? Do they need a double-blind study of infection of patients divided into two groups–one group getting polluted water, and the other, clean water to understand the problem? That kind of thinking went out with the Tuskeegee experiment!
Please keep at us, we need it! Please call upon me if I can be of help. That may sound disloyal to the ADA; however, the safety of everyone in the dental office is much more important than the ADA. Hippocrates` admonition: “First, do no harm” should be guiding our control of contamination and infection control.