Surgical suction as a major breach in infection control during oral surgery

[Dashakol]

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Hi, Do you use surgical suction also for removing saliva during surgery? This has been bugging me for a while because it's clearly a major breach in terms of infection control, I mean moving the tip of suction back and forth from oral cavity to operation site. This simply makes all those strict and religiously followed sterility measures more like a joke. The only solution that came to my mind was putting a separate low volume saliva ejector on the corner of mouth and limiting the surgical suction tip only to the site of surgery (i.e any thing under the flap).
Is it the standard solution?
Is there any other option?
What do you do usually in everyday practice?
What did they told you in school? (Did they even mention it?)
Thanks

P.S. Actually this is the reason why I joined SDN today!

 

[Tootyfruity]

oral cavity is considered a clean and contaminated site, intraoral surgeries are not sterile
you do all that you can within reason
there's a difference between keeping the surgical site uncontaminated and routine infection control, which is more meant to prevent diseases from jumping from person to person
a surgical suction is a necessity, you can't operate with blood all over your field
you can sterilize reusable surgical suction tips
periop infections are managed with a combination of things including irrigation, local and systemic antimicrobials, patient selection/optimization, post op care, minimizing surgical trauma, sterility precautions are just a part of it

 

[Dashakol]

Let's put aside anything we do to prevent cross-contamination, the rest is what we do to prevent introducing infection to the open wound during surgery, right? The problem is that when you put surgical suction in saliva it's not sterile anymore, thus it won't be that much different for example from a disposable non-sterile latex glove we use for every day works. So why insisting on using sterile surgical gloves?

 

[Mr.Scalpel]

This simply makes all those strict and religiously followed sterility measures more like a joke.

Evolution of quantitative bacteriology in wound management.