Indoor Air Quality in Dental School Environment: A Pilot Study

There is limited use of dental assistants and high power evacuators for student dentists in many US dental schools. Objectives: to evaluate the indoor air quality in clinical and non-clinical locations before and during patient care using oral/respiratory microflora as the biological indicator. Methods: A total of 100 blood agar plates (BAP) are used. Individual BAPs are placed in each of 10 locations at Tufts University School of Dental Medicine before and during patient care observations. Location 1 to 7, Predoctoral and specialty clinics, have limited use of dental assistants and high power evacuators. Location 8 -Dental Faculty Practice Clinic has regular use of dental assistants and/or high power evacuator. The non-clinical areas are: Location 9 - patient waiting area; and location 10 - administrative office (control group). Each BAP is left open for 30 minutes and later was incubated at 35⁰C in an increased carbon dioxide chamber for 72 hours. Subsequently, the CFU was counted. All mean square root of CFU from ten locations were examined for intergroup differences using one factor analysis of variance in each observation and both observations. The Tukey B post hoc analysis is used for multiple comparisons. Results: The mean square roots of CFU before patient care among the ten locations revealed there is no statistically significant difference (p ³ 0.001). The mean square roots of CFU during the patient care among ten locations revealed there is no statistically significant difference (p ³0.001). Multiple comparisons for all locations both observations revealed that there was no statistically significant difference between Location 10 (control group) to the other locations (p ³ 0.05). Conclusions: The indoor air quality in the administrative office is similar to the clinical and non-clinical dental practice areas both before and during patient care within the dental school environment.