Americans under the age of forty, and most under the age of fifty, will not be able to remember a time when dentists and dental technicians did not routinely wear nitrile gloves during examinations, fillings, and root canals. The same can be said for many visits to their family physicians. When I had the end of my finger sewn back on after a sledding accident in the winter of 1957, our hometown doctor did not wear gloves, nor did he a few years later when he closed up the gash on my forehead incurred during backyard tackle football. For more than half of the American population younger than me, disposable single-use plastic items just form part of their everyday medical world rather than a relatively recent change in standard medical protocols.

The HIV/AIDS crisis in the United States beginning in 1981 led to a relatively sudden and intense concern with the transmission of infectious diseases from doctor to patient unparalleled since the end of the nineteenth century. Although other infectious diseases, such as hepatitis, were a cause of concern in the United States, no other illness matched the fear and anxiety prompted by AIDS/HIV. Within a few years, the invoking of anti-discrimination regulations about people with AIDS led to increasing concern about safe and effective means of treating such people in medical settings, as well as such people safely treating others. By 1989 the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) proposed regulations for the wearing of personal protective equipment (hereafter PPE) in dental settings, and in December of 1991 it finalized those regulations over the opposition of the American Dental Association. Making the use of such equipment standard procedure across all types of medical settings led to a dramatic increase in the use of disposable plastic-based supplies in the treating of contagious and potentially contagious people.

While not old enough to remember bare-handed dentists, most Americans are, however, old enough to remember the “syringe tide.” As in the previous year, but more extensively in 1988, beaches were closed in New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York due to medical waste washing ashore.