Background:
Dental impressions are a common source for transmission of infection between dental clinics and dental labs. Dental impressions can be cross-contaminated by patient’s saliva and blood, which then cross-infect the dental casts poured from the impressions.
Objective:
To evaluate the current practices of disinfection of dental impressions and their protocols and to assess the knowledge of cross-infection control among dental technicians in Jordan.
Method:
Dental technicians (n=85) completed a self-administered questionnaire about their practices of disinfection for dental impressions.
Results:
The distribution of dental technicians was 63.8% fixed prosthodontics, 23.5% removable prosthodontics, 7.8% orthodontics, and 4.8% maxillofacial prosthodontics. The majority of the laboratories did not have instructions related to disinfection of impressions. About 50% of technicians were vaccinated against HBV. About 44.7%, and 42.9% of labs reported that they never disinfect alginate or silicon impressions, respectively. In addition, the majority of lab owners (53%) believed that the dentist should disinfect the impressions before shipping them to dental laboratories, while (45%) believed that disinfecting the impressions is the responsibility of the dental assistant. Moreover, about 38% of this study population reported not using gloves in their labs. In those labs were disinfection was used, 51% used spray disinfection whereas 32.6% used immersion disinfection. The cost of disinfectant was ranked as the most important factor (51.3% of the cases) for the dental technician to choose the disinfectant followed by its effectiveness.
Conclusion:
Dental technician practices in impression disinfection was not satisfactory, therefore, education programs about impression disinfection are needed.
Retractions are on the rise as a result of a surge in post-publication peer review and an emboldened anonymous whistle-blowing movement. Cognizant that their brand may be damaged as a result of not correcting problematic literature, journals and publishers that are loosely considered to be non-“predatory” are trying to contain the deluge of reports on flawed research that has flooded the biomedical and scientific literature. Within this climate, many studies have started to be retracted and corrected, reinforcing the stigmatization associated with retractions, i.e., having a retraction is considered to be a bad or negative thing. Negative retraction stigmatization has mainly been borne by authors, whereas journals and publishers, except for headline-grabbing reports, have thus far largely avoided this stigma. One of the efforts to destigmatize retractions, at least those for honest errors, has been to try to relabel or rebrand retractions. The terms “self-retraction”, “amendment”, “publisher-caused error”, and others have emerged, but such a diverse lexicon may complicate the publishing landscape more than it resolves the stigma. Seeking euphemistic terms to represent a truth within a toxic context of negative stigmatization only politicizes the issue, and does not resolve it. We suggest that a change is needed in the culture within the biomedical community, to acceptance of critique, and that the culture of shaming needs to be halted in order to achieve this. Only then can academics assume greater responsibility, without the risk of being shamed, of retracting their faulty literature, “honestly”, when they feel that this is needed.
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