Subject:
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Re: What's the point of wearing rubber gloves...
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Thu, 29 Jul 2004 21:14:50 GMT
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Viewed:
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836 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Larry Pieniazek wrote:
> There certainly IS such a point, sometimes...
>
> The gloves are there to protect you from what you are about to touch rather
> than to protect what you are about to touch from you.
Oh, I agree on that point. If you're putting on the gloves to keep your skin
clean while you're scrubbing out a scum-coated pipe, do whatever you feel is
necessary to get the gloves to fit right.
> That's not the case in this particular example, I suspect,
No, it kind of got sidetracked by the first reply...
> and I agree, the TV detective is not practicing proper procedure...
Again, this was a real detective from the real NYPD working a real murder case,
not a character on a TV drama. It's basically a mix between "NYPD Blue" and
"Cops".
> (her gloves, in this case, are the more conventional way round... they're
> protecting me from her fingers)
I suspect that in this case the gloves are intended as a two-way barrier. After
all, how comfortable would you be working on someone's teeth without gloves if
you thought they might have something like HIV? It only takes one little nick
on your finger while working a mouth with gingivitis to infect you with anything
they've got.
> But when it IS the case, as long as you aren't contaminated before you start,
> and as long as you don't cut the gloves, it doesn't matter *where* you touch
> the gloves, inside or out, as doing so does not reduce their protection of
> you from things you touch.
>
> Make sense?
If you're taking a DNA sample, the glove is there to keep your DNA from mingling
with the sample you're about to take. I'd say that a major requirement for how
that works is that you'd need to keep your DNA restricted to the inside of the
gloves. Tugging on the fingertips of one glove (the parts most likely to be
touching anything) with an ungloved hand seems rather counterproductive, don't
you think?
Granted, this particular detective was only testing for the presence of human
blood in a rust-colored smear on the wall, so DNA contamination wasn't really a
concern, but his long-term evidence gathering techniques are.
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: What's the point of wearing rubber gloves...
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| (...) There certainly IS such a point, sometimes... The gloves are there to protect you from what you are about to touch rather than to protect what you are about to touch from you. That's not the case in this particular example, I suspect, and I (...) (20 years ago, 29-Jul-04, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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