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Picture of a hand wearing a surgical glove and making a thumbs-up sign

Review of the effectivess of latex and non-latex disposable gloves

Douglas Badenoch

A new review by the Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health (CADTH) summarises the evidence for different types of glove in surgical settings.

The review concludes that latex gloves may be more resistant to punctures than non-latex gloves in the surgical setting. Vinyl gloves are permeable to chemotherapy and are not suitable for use when exposure to cytotoxic agents is possible.

The reviewers did not find any evidence found about the allergy potential, cost-effectiveness, effectiveness to prevent pathogen transmission, or recommended duration of use of latex versus non-latex gloves.

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Written by

I am an information scientist with an interest in making knowledge from systematic research more accessible to people who need it. This means you. I've been attempting this in the area of Evidence-Based Health Care since 1995. So far the results have been mixed. For some reason we expected busy clinicians to search databases and appraise papers instead of seeing patients. We also expected publishers to make the research freely available to the people who paid for it.. Ha! Hence The National Elf service.

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