An analysis to study trends in occupational exposure to antineoplastic drugs among health care workers

Benefits of Wipe Sampling: Evaluation of Long-Term 5-Fluorouracil and Platinum Monitoring Data

“…This has been supported by the results of many other studies [19,21,22,27,40,41], and is insofar critical as gloves are often not worn in areas where no contamination is expected [42]. Nevertheless, the present findings generally range in lower magnitudes than results from older studies [13,33,43,44] and also from more recent international studies [19,28,31,41,[45][46][47], indicating country-specific levels of contamination and pointing out the constant improvements in occupational hygiene practice in the participating pharmacies. The continuous improvement is likely to have benefitted from repeated and long-term monitoring.…”

“…Moreover, a potentially less strict application of safety recommendations or hygiene strategies, or lack of experience in AD preparation due to smaller preparation numbers may also be reasons for higher contamination incidents. As expected, results show that BSCs and isolators were frequently contaminated, which has also been shown in other studies [12,19,22,[30][31][32][33][34], and also the waste disposal systems (e. g.; Pactosafe). At these locations, large quantities of drugs are handled and spillage is likely to happen.…”

“…A time trend has also been reported in Canadian hospitals for other ADs with a substantial (4-5-times) decrease of the 75th percentile of contamination concentration over several years [14,48] while the proportion of positive results remained approximately constant. Likewise, European studies described a reduction in surface contamination over time for various ADs [27,28,31,49]. This is most likely related to the increased awareness of the health hazard of occupational exposure to ADs and to the implementation of international and national guidelines.…”

“…This is most likely related to the increased awareness of the health hazard of occupational exposure to ADs and to the implementation of international and national guidelines. Levels seem to decrease since the introduction of technical improvements such as CSTDs [30], standardized working and cleaning strategies and environmental contamination controls on practice quality [21,27,31,32,49,50]. But it is also substantially dependent from the sufficient adherence to recommended practices, which are -as even shown in recent studies -often insufficiently followed [47,51,52].…”

Environmental Contamination with Hazardous Drugs in Quebec Hospitals

“…[11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] This large group of recently published studies affords a good "snapshot" of current levels of surface contamination in several countries. The studies were conducted in a total of 92 hospitals in 7 countries (28 in Germany, 21 26 in the United States, 12,20,23 16 in Italy, 14,15,22 13 in Japan, 11,13,18,19 6 in Canada, 16 2 in Australia, 24 and 1 in the Czech Republic…”