A registered nurse for 30 years, Gayle Gaynor couldn't understand what was making her eyes itch and nose clog after a few hours at Mount Desert Island Hospital, in Bar Harbor. In time, her symptoms worsened into severe chest pain that finally forced her to leave a job she loved. Gaynor came to ask the Health and Human Services committee to make Maine the first state to ban powdered latex gloves. The Maine State Nurses Association and other supporters of a ban said there are alternatives to latex that can spare health-care workers such as Gaynor from illness and even death. They noted the case of Sherry Fee Swinburne, of Scarborough, a nurse at Maine Medical Center who died from a sudden illness in 1997, two years after developing an allergic reaction to latex that forced her out of the hospital.
Latex gloves, they said, offer superior protection and dexterity in many cases.
And they said hospitals and many other facilities are already taking steps to deal with the estimated 6 percent to 17 percent of health-care workers who are sensitive or allergic to latex. Latex is a milky white sap tapped from rubber trees. It's used in thousands of products, but is especially common in medical settings. Sensitivity to latex became a growing concern in the health-care industry in the late 1980s, after the federal government set up requirements to slow the spread of HIV and other infectious diseases. By the 1990s, the use of latex gloves had shot up from 12 billion nationally to more than 200 billion pairs a year.