Make Surgical Smoke Evacuation Mandatory
Let's clear the air and address a major health hazard facing OR staff.
I
n 2013, orthopedic surgeon Anthony K.
Hedley, MD, FRCS, was diagnosed with
idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), a
disease that's as bad as it sounds. Irreversible
and ultimately fatal, IPF causes scar tissue to
grow inside your lungs. At age 70, he under-
went a life-saving double lung transplant.
What else could have caused this, he
thought, but 40 years of smoking? No, he'd
never touched a cigarette, but he had
inhaled the surgical plume from nearly 11,000 joint replacements.
"That's 30 to 40,000 hours. That's a lot of exposure," he says. "I've made a lot
of Bovie smoke in my day."
Bovie smoke. That's what he
calls the byproduct of high-heat electrical
tools used to cut and cauterize skin and tissue during surgery.
"It's noxious. There's nothing nice about it," says Dr. Hedley. "It smells
like a barbecue. Either you're burning flesh or you're burning fat. Some
nasty things come out of Bovie smoke."
Nasty is a good word. Consider:
• Surgical smoke contains about 150 chemicals, including 16 EPA priori-
ty pollutants, toxic and carcinogenic substances, and viruses and bacteria.
As early as 1988, researchers published studies that revealed the presence
of mutagens, carcinogens, and viable disease-causing cells in the smoke
plume produced by heat destruction of human tissue.
• The smoke produced in an OR every day can be equivalent to smoking
as many as 30 unfiltered cigarettes. That's 1
1
⁄2 packs of Pall Malls a day.
And yet exposure to surgical smoke remains one of the largest unad-
dressed health hazards facing operating room staff today. Will it remain
8 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 7
Editor's Page
Dan O'Connor
Anthony K. Hedley, MD, FRCS
