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PPE Past, Present and Future A PPE leader examines how the spike in demand due to COVID-19 compares to other historical markers, and how it could reshape the industry moving forward.
Editor’s note: Billy Harris, CEO of Sri Trang USA, Inc., spoke with Efficiency in Group Practice Publisher Scott Adams on the history of the glove business as it relates to public health scares, how demand spiked during COVID-19, the challenges of bringing manufacturing of gloves to the United States, and more. The following were ten insights from the interview.
This isn’t the first time we’ve faced a PPE shortage In 1989, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued universal precautions because of AIDS. The universal precautions were just a simple statement: if you encounter bodily fluid, you should glove, gown, and mask. “That took the whole industry by a little bit of surprise,” said Harris. For the glove business, the universal precautions of 1989 meant explosive growth. In that particular year in Malaysia alone, the Malaysian government issued 300 permits for the manufacturing of gloves, Harris said, “though not all of those permits were fulfilled, or factories built.” At the time, there was still a fair amount of domestic production in the United States. However, since then, manufacturing has migrated to places like China, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Glove manufacturing didn’t leave the U.S. because of cheap labor When the gloves produced in the United States migrated to South Asia and China, it wasn’t because of cheap labor, Harris said. “Gloves left because that’s where the raw material is, and the raw material most in demand at
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the time would’ve been latex.” In the 1980s and up until about 2000, latex would have been the first choice of product, then vinyl, and then nitrile, Harris said. Today it’s nitrile, vinyl, and then latex.
Following the universal precautions in 1989, there’s been an event every few years that felt like it was going to have an impact on infection prevention and PPE For instance, in 2001, you had the anthrax scare with the U.S. Postal Service, Harris said. “At one point, the U.S. Postal Service wanted everybody to glove and have some form of protection, but that lasted for about three months. The U.S. Postal Service went out and bought millions of gloves. Three months later they were trying to return them
Efficiency In Group Practice : ISSUE 4 • 2020
because none of the workers would use them, and the whole anthrax scare went away due to good law enforcement practices to get to the root cause of it.” > 2002: A West Nile Virus outbreak occurred, “but it really didn’t have an impact on the U.S. market in terms of any unusual demands outside of the normal demand.” > 2003: SARS. “It didn’t really impact availability of product.” > 2005: The system was challenged with bird flu. “When I say the system, I mean the manufacturing community,” Harris said, “which needed to make sure we had enough gloves not just in the U.S., but other hot spots of the world. So, there was a demand issue.” > 2006: An E. coli scare, “but that did not negatively affect the glove business,” Harris said. > 2008: An economic downturn. “Interesting enough, at least in the glove business, when there were tough economic times, we tended to thrive better both in volume to the market and in profitability for the company.” > 2009: H1N1, or swine flu, “and again that was a global issue
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