Dentists returning to work during the COVID-19 pandemic may be thinking about purchasing items to help sanitize or reduce dental aerosols, but many products currently lack research demonstrating they are effective.
For instance, information is limited on how best to manage air flow in dental settings to mitigate risk.
“All we can say is that air flow control can help play a role, and even for that, we don’t have any concrete evidence,” said Dr. Purnima Kumar, Ph.D., professor of periodontology at Ohio State University, who participated in an American Dental Association webinar on aerosol and the transmission of coronavirus. “We only have evidence from medicine, where infectious disease units and isolation rooms have air flow controls based on principles of laminar flow. That’s all the evidence we have right now, so everything else at this point is conjecture.”
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