"When a pandemic is underway, hospitals can get away with saying that a worker's disease might have come from outside the workplace," says Kappler. "And it can take a year or more for diseases like Hepatitis or HIV to show up. But the operators of a nuclear or chemical plant don't have the same wiggle room if one of their workers suffers from radiation poisoning or gets a bad burn. The cause and effect is clear and the lawsuits will fly, so they take protective clothing much more seriously in those environments."

Another reason the protection of front-line healthcare workers is compromised boils down to hospital economics. "A Provent 10,000 gown costs $7 to $10 and it'll protect against viral diseases like H1N1 as well as blood-borne diseases like HIV," says Kappler. "Yet we find it often gets compared to a little yellow gown that sells for a couple of bucks that would let a mosquito go through it. It's like comparing apples to raisins, but some hospitals buy what they can get away with to save a few dollars."

This is false economics, with or without a looming pandemic. Statistics from the Cambridge, MA-based Institute for Healthcare Improvement show it costs a U.S. hospital between $50,000 and $100,000 to replace one nurse, not including salary, because of overtime payments, payments to temporary nurses and the recruiting and training process for a permanent replacement.

"When something like H1N1 hits, a hospital needs every trained person healthy and working," says Kappler. "The upfront cost to properly protect those people is nothing compared to the cost of losing them."

SOURCE: Kappler, Inc.