Efficacy of Different Hair and Skin Decontamination Strategies with Identification of Associated Hazards to First Responders.

Established procedures for mass casualty decontamination involve the deployment of equipment for showering with water (such as the ladder pipe system [LPS] and technical decontamination [TD]). This necessarily introduces a short, but critical delay. The incorporation of dry decontamination to the incident response process offers the potential to establish a more rapid and timely intervention.

Decontamination and Management of Contaminated Hair following a CBRN or HazMat Incident.

This in vitro study evaluated the "triple protocol" of dry decontamination, the ladder pipe system (a method for gross decontamination), and technical decontamination for the decontamination of hair following chemical contamination. First, we assessed the efficacy of the 3 protocols, alone or in combination, on excised porcine skin and human hair contaminated with either methyl salicylate (MS), phorate (PHR), sodium fluoroacetate (SFA), or potassium cyanide (KCN). A second experiment investigated the residual hair contamination following decontamination with the triple protocol at different intervals postexposure.

Hybrid in vitro diffusion cell for simultaneous evaluation of hair and skin decontamination: temporal distribution of chemical contaminants.

Most casualty or personnel decontamination studies have focused on removing contaminants from the skin. However, scalp hair and underlying skin are the most likely areas of contamination following airborne exposure to chemicals. The aim of this study was to investigate the interactions of contaminants with scalp hair and underlying skin using a hybrid in vitro diffusion cell model.

Evaluation of US Federal Guidelines (Primary Response Incident Scene Management [PRISM]) for Mass Decontamination of Casualties During the Initial Operational Response to a Chemical Incident.

Study Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate the clinical and operational effectiveness of US federal government guidance (Primary Response Incident Scene Management [PRISM]) for the initial response phase to chemical incidents.

Methods: The study was performed as a large-scale exercise (Operation DOWNPOUR). Volunteers were dosed with a chemical warfare agent simulant to quantify the efficacy of different iterations of dry, ladder pipe system, or technical decontamination.