Volume 9 • 2022 • Issue 1

The public health measures, the masking, the social distancing, all the protective PPE that dentists use, the prescreening of the patients and virtual visits. All of this together led to a lower rate of infection. W hen dental offices began to reopen after initial closures during the pandemic, there was uncertainty about how COVID-19 might affect dentists. Dr. Sreenath Madathil, an assistant professor in the faculty of dentistry at McGill University, and his colleagues across Canada wanted to know more. How many dentists were getting the virus? How well did PPE and other measures work to prevent transmission? “Often other studies of COVID incidence among health care workers weren’t including oral health professionals,” says Dr. Madathil, so he and eight other researchers from across Canada worked together to design and carry out a study. “We asked dentists if they’d been diagnosed with COVID. We also asked about symptoms, what kind of dental treatments they were doing in their offices, the number of patients they were seeing, what PPE they were using, and what kind of precautions they were using outside of their work life.” They also tested the saliva of 226 participants for the virus every 4 weeks to catch instances of asymptomatic COVID. The interim analysis found that the incidence of COVID infection in dentists was slightly lower than the general population. “The low infection rate is a cumulative effect of all the different protective measures we used,” says Dr. Madathil. “The public health measures, the masking, the social distancing, all the protective PPE that dentists use, the prescreening of the patients and virtual visits. All of this together led to a lower rate of infection.” Studies of COVID incidence in dentists in France and the US also saw similarly low levels compared to the general population, Dr. Madathil says. What’s next? Dr. Madathil and colleagues are studying the incidence of COVID among Canadian dental hygienists. “We are bringing together the same team to do more pan-Canadian research,” he says. “Collaboration has been very fruitful for us.” “We gathered data for a year,” says Dr. Madathil. “The paper we’ve just published is an interim analysis of the first 6 months.” Dr. Madathil says the biggest surprise among the results was that none of the saliva samples tested positive. “We expected to catch an asymptomatic case, but we didn’t during the first 6 month period,” he says. “It is possible that there weren’t any infections among those 226 dentists. It is also possible that we missed some asymptomatic infections that occurred in between the saliva samples, which were 4 weeks apart.” Dr. Sreenath Madathil Reference 1. Madathil S, Siqueira WL, Marin LM, Sanaulla FB, Faraj N, Quiñonez CR, et al. The incidence of COVID-19 among dentists practicing in the community in Canada: A prospective cohort study over a six-month period. J Am Dent Assoc ; 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adaj.2021.10.006 23 Issue 1 | 2022 | News and Events