The rapid spread of the Coronavirus globally has not only shown how poorly prepared we are to meet a pandemic head-on but has also highlighted the need for preventative measures to be considered and established immediately.
BRISBANE CITY, Queensland, February 12, 2020: It’s no secret that one of the major contributors to the spread of this deadly virus is unhygienic hand sanitising measures, not just in public, but also in medical facilities.
This is why hygienic hand protocols to prevent contamination in medical facilities and from person-to-person need to be implemented.
Brisbane-based Australian company, Glovematic, holds world-wide patents on the first practical Automatic Glove Application System (AGAS).
The system dispenses and opens a glove automatically for the user to insert their hand and remove it from the machine.
The person does not touch the outside of the glove at all so it cannot be contaminated by anything on the person’s hands, eliminating the risk of the virus being spread.
“There is much misinformation out there about how viruses, such as the Coronavirus spread. It’s not generally understood that a great deal of contamination is passed on by virus and bacterial contamination of a person’s hands,” said Glovematic Chairman, Michael Bigg.
“The most effective way to control this is by frequent sanitisation of the hands by washing (which few people do properly) and by the wearing (and frequent change) of disposable gloves,” Mr Bigg continued.
“The problem is that the wearer contaminates the gloves as they are being put on. Even if the wearer has properly washed their hands first, this just reduces the concentration of infection and doesn’t get rid of it (and often they don’t wash their hands properly or at all).
The act of putting the gloves on contaminates them. Often, they have been contaminated by a previous user – even dropped on the floor – but are still used,” he said.
The machines are cheap to manufacture, and it takes just a second or two to apply a glove which is quicker than most people can apply one manually.
“We see our main market as healthcare in all its forms and food production, preparation and distribution,” continues Mr Bigg.
“It’s important to remember that disposable gloves are used everywhere in society – in manufacturing and other industries to protect workers in some cases and in other cases to prevent contamination of electronics being manufactured etc.,” he continued.
Mr Bigg pointed out that 1 billion is a very large number – a billion seconds is about 31.5 years, and there are hundreds of billions of disposable gloves used every year around the world.
Currently, every one of those gloves is pulled from a box like a tissue box and put on manually by the user.
If gloves were being dispensed, automatically, without the chance of cross-contamination, the spread of infectious diseases would be minimised dramatically.
“The automation of dispensing is a natural evolution of glove use in the same way that years ago cakes of soap would be found in public bathrooms, but now soap is dispensed from a liquid soap dispenser,” said Mr Bigg.
Mr Bigg said that for
