A Stark County company has come up with a glove that's resistant to fentanyl — one of the drugs that first responders have increasingly been exposed to when treating opioid overdose victims.
This past summer, at least two police officers in Northeast Ohio reported being sickened by exposure to fentanyl during drug busts. Now, PH&S Products in Minerva says it has a solution.
The company makes nitrile examination gloves, which look and feel like the ones used by physicians. The company says it's making a new type of glove with a compound that is resistant to fentanyl.
Company spokesman Matt Fox says the "ResQ-Grip" gloves were created as a response to the growing opioid problem in Ohio.
“There’s a lot of different nitrile mixes [so] that you can have a different type of glove with different chemical compounds. But they wanted to find the one that would be the most resistant – the toughest they could find.
“[First responders are] the folks that show up on the scene right away and they’re basically going in there unprotected. We should try to find a glove that has the right chemical compound that we can help them be protected against those kinds of drugs. I would say this process took about two years for us to develop this glove.”
Fox adds that the gloves proved resistant to fentanyl even when immersed in the drug for up to six hours. He'll be demonstrating them this weekend at an annual conference for police chiefs taking place in Philadelphia.
