Washington, United States: The advisors of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention have recently announced that healthcare providers should wear masks while treating patients – who are suspected to have a contagious disease.
The recommendation has not outlined what kind of masks should be worn – loose-fitting surgical masks or fitted tightly woven N95 masks.
According to the reports by CNN Health, the CDC has advised the use of N95 masks when dealing with patients having diseases for which treatment or vaccines are not available. Similar kinds of masks are suggested to use when the patients are having infections that spread via the air, including measles.
New draft guidelines by Health Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee (HICPAC)
According to the new draft guidelines from the Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee (HICPAC), masks are not mandatory.
According to the statement shared by the president of National Nurses United – Zenei Triunfo-Cortez, “HICPAC’s draft is permissive and weak and seeks not just to maintain existing practice — which has been shown to be inadequately protective — but even rolls back the use of some important measures, such as airborne infection isolation rooms,” as per the HealthDay News.
“This draft guidance will only further degrade the already dangerous working conditions of nurses and other health care workers and further contribute to high rates of moral distress, which will only serve to drive more nurses away from the bedside and further deepen the staffing crisis in health care,” she added.
“HICPAC is missing the perspective of frontline nurses, other health care workers, our unions,” Triunfo-Cortez said, adding, “As nurses, we carry out many essential pieces of infection prevention. We have insights and expertise that are essential to crafting protective guidance.”
“During the COVID pandemic, nurses saw too many patients and colleagues become infected, get sick and even die because of inadequate infection prevention,” she further emphasized.
Number of physicians who died in 2020-2021 in the US
According to a recent study by the researchers of the Stanford and University of Southern California at Los Angeles, as many as 4,500 physicians lost their lives between 2020 and the end of 2021. This count was 600 more than the expected count.
According to the reports published by CNN, an epidemiologist and professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health – Dr David Michaels, said, “This is going backward,” when he was emphasizing that the guidelines could have benefited from knowledge gained during the pandemic about the transmission of respiratory infections.
Michaels was quoted saying, “I think what’s happened here is the members of this committee came to us with prejudgment on how infection control should be applied.”
The former head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Michaels, mentioned, “ This committee has no members who have expertise in worker protection or in aerosol science. And so their view of infection control is a hospital-based view and hasn’t changed in decades.”
CNN further noted that the committee consisted of three members, whose editorial was published in June, who argued against the universal masking in healthcare settings to cure the spread of COVID.
In addition to this, an editorial was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, which read, “We have achieved major advancements in the prevention as well as management of SARS-CoV-2 since the pathogen was identified in the year 2019.”
“In recognition of these achievements, the time has come to de-implement policies that are not appropriate for an endemic pathogen when the expected benefits of such policies are low. Universal masking in health care is a policy whose time has changed,” it further outlined according to HealthDay News. According to several reports, the vote by the committee will be forwarded to the CDC for approval. There is a revised period of 60 days for guidance, as per reports by CNN, the final guidelines aren’t expected before 2024.