Review Article - Asian Journal of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences (2022) Volume 12, Issue 91

Adverse effects due to use of personal protective equipment (PPE) in health care workers in COVID-19.

In December 2019, a new coronavirus was found in Wuhan, China which spread rapidly across other countries including India. It is an highly infectious disease which was labelled as pandemic on11th March 2020.And to cope up with this pandemic, the first line workers i.e. the health care workers were volunteered to work for the same. Due to the high infectivity of SARS CoV-2, and the close contact of the health care workers with the patients, the health care workers (HCW) needed to do frequent hand wash and wear personal protective equipment (PPE) in the form of triple layered masks, hand gloves, gowns, goggles, face shields, shoes and etc to protect them from infection while treating the patients and thus securing a safe working condition for better management of the outbreak. But the use of the PPE kits for a long duration of time was not that easy and lead to some psychological and physiological effects including respiratory problems and in many cases skin related issues ranging from mild to severe. The skin related issues included side effects like dryness, itching which most commonly were found, besides this pain, redness, ulcers, acne in concordance with several adverse skin reactions were also present. The main affected sites include nose, cheeks, chin, hand, trunk and in very few instances axilla and groin. In this review article we will mainly discuss about the skin related reactions and adverse effects seen in Health Care workers (HWC) by the use of PPE kits during the pandemic.

Author(s): Pratibha Dawande*

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