KEEP IT LOCAL
OU College of Dentistry By: Fernando Luis Esteban Florez DDS, PhD, MS A new type of coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) was identified by Chinese health authorities in December of 2019. Shortly thereafter, on January 9, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that 59 new cases of this mysterious and highly infectious pneumonia-like disease were reported in Wuhan hospitals. On January 21, 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed that a Washington state resident became the first person in the United States to have contracted the new SARS-CoV-2. Two days later, Wuhan hospitals announced that 13 additional deaths and over 300 new cases of COVID-19 had been confirmed. Because of the highly contagious nature of the disease, Chinese officials implemented a rigorous lockdown that impacted millions of citizens in Wuhan and Huanggang. On January 31, 2020, the WHO confirmed 200 deaths and over 9,800 new cases of COVID-19 across many countries including Germany, Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan, and the United States. Based on the rapid rate of spread, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus ,Director General, WHO, said that the agency was “…deeply concerned by the alarming levels of
spread and severity of the outbreak…” before declaring COVID-19 a pandemic of global proportions. It was not until March 13, 2020, that former President Donald J. Trump declared the novel coronavirus a national emergency. On March 20, 2020, the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center College of Dentistry (OUCOD) paused all inperson clinical and educational operations. Employees were instructed to work remotely and only mission-critical personnel were authorized back on campus. In dentistry, the utilization of rotary instruments (low- and highspeed) and ultrasonic scalers results in the formation of significant amounts of aerosols containing a broad variety of microorganisms. Due to the nature of transmission of SARS-CoV-2 via aerosol transmission, OUCOD researcher, Esteban Florez, D.D.S., M.S., Ph.D., Assistant Professor and Head of Dental Biomaterials, began work on developing improved engineering controls capable of decreasing the risk transmission of respiratory infectious diseases in dental settings. In order to achieve that goal, Dr. Esteban Florez became a member of the OU Emergency Equipment Taskforce lead by Dr. Tom Wavering, Ph.D., who is the Executive Director of the Tom Love Innovation Hub (I-HUB). The taskforce had the objective of connecting OU researchers in Norman, Oklahoma City, and Tulsa to generate new technologies to combat the COVID-19 threat. A collaboration between OUCOD and the I-HUB was established by Drs. Esteban Florez and Wavering to design and produce a new aerosol evacuation system (ProTecT-Shield). The team was composed of Brandt Smith (Laboratory Director, I-HUB), Tyler Thibodeau (undergraduate student, OU School of Industrial and Systems Engineering), Dr. Paul Mullasseril (Dean, OUCOD), Mr. Michael Ferguson (Senior Associate Dean for Finances, OUCOD), Dr. Sharukh Khajotia (Associate Dean for Research and Innovation, OUCOD) and Dr. Chalmers Rieger Wood III (Director of Tulsa Clinic, OUCOD).
Following this, Dr. Esteban Florez established a research collaboration with experts in the field of aerosol management and control, Drs. Evan Floyd and Changjie Cai from the Department of Occupational and Figure 1. Dr. Esteban Florez demonstrating the proper positioning of the Pro-TecT-Shield over a phantom head coupled to the collison nebulizer used to suspend particles in air (right); 2-D model of Environmental Health of the OUHSC Hudson the Green Clinic illustrating the air vents/exhausts (red squares), dental chairs (blue/gray), cabinetry College of Public Health, in order to test Pro(green). The red circle on the blue chair indicates the position of the collison nebulizer. Numbers in the TecT-Shield’s efficacy in evacuating particles of know diameters (0.10 μm to 20.0 μm). The model indicate the locations where the analysis of particle concentrations took place (right, adapted testing of the Pro-TecT-Shield took place in from Esteban Florez et al., 2021).
40 journal | January/February 2022
