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Morning Medical Update: Face masks and wildfire smoke; Non-sterile, single-use pneumatic tourniquet cuffs conservation strategies; Suicide assessment tool
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Experts say wearing N95 or KN95 masks will help protect you from wildfire smoke and COVID. According to Dr. William Lang, the chief medical officer at WorldClinic and a former director of the White House Medical Unit,‘N95 mask filters out 95% of particles larger than 0.3 microns, so they’re very efficient with keeping out the 2.5-micron particles in wildfire smoke.’ Cloth masks may be beneficial for short periods.
Non-sterile, single-use pneumatic tourniquet cuffs conservation strategies
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is advising physicians on ways to conserve single-use pneumatic tourniquet cuffs during the shortage. They advise physicians to reuse if necessary, recommending they are cleaned between uses. To disinfect, soak the cuff in 70%-90% in ethyl or isopropyl alcohol for 1 minute.
A new checklist may be able to tell which suicidal patients need to be admitted and which should be safely discharged. The Abbreviated Suicide Crisis Syndrome Checklist (A-SCS-C) is allegedly "shows robust clinical utility and may actually reduce the limitations of relying on self-reported suicidal ideation to determine suicide risk," study co-author Lisa Cohen, PhD, clinical professor of psychiatry, Carl Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai Beth Israel, New York, said in an interview.
