Standard Precautions for Infection Control in Dentistry

With the vast number of infections affecting humans either clinically or sub clinically it is impossible to ascertain whether the patient who attends for dental treatment is a carrier of infectious agents. Therefore, all patients should be treated as if they were reservoirs of pathogens. The infection control procedures involved in such treatment are termed standard precautions (previously termed universal precautions) and all clinical procedures performed on any patient should be conducted using standard infection control.

The first set of recommendations on infection control in dentistry, issued in the late 1980s, focused primarily on the transmission of blood-borne pathogen transmission in dental care and other clinical settings and was termed universal precautions. These recommendations emphasized the need to treat blood and other bloody fluids contaminated with blood from all patients as potentially infectious. However the realization that moist body substances are equally important in disease transmission led to the development of standard precautions in the mid-1990s. Thus standard precautions are similar to universal precautions as they are designed to reduce the risk of infection transmission from both recognized and unrecognized sources of infection to patients and clinicians. Standard precautions apply to contact with blood, all body fluids, secretions and excretions except sweat, regardless of whether they contain blood, non-intact skin and mucous membranes.