Waste anaesthetic gas exposure in veterinary surgeries: A need for scavenging systems

Abstract

Extract

In recent years the medical profession has shown increasing concern over the potential health hazard of chronic exposure to anaesthetic gases. People engaged in full time veterinary anaesthesia or surgery may be expected to experience exposures similar to those documented among human surgical and anaesthetic personnel ^{(9) (11) (14) (15) (18)} . However, veterinarians in private practice may have less exposure to trace anaesthetic gases than do surgical teams in human hospitals. Wingfield et al. ⁽²⁵⁾ estimated that the mean number of hours per week personnel used inhalation anaesthetics ranged from 1-20 among small animal and mixed practice veterinarians.