Impact of underreporting on the management of occupational bloodborne exposures in a dental teaching environment.

The objectives of this study were to determine the rates of bloodborne exposures experienced by junior and senior dental students at a large dental teaching institution during 2001-02 and the percentages of these bloodborne exposures that were reported by the students to their designated counselors. Two hundred and four third- and fourth-year students voluntarily and anonymously filled out a questionnaire on the numbers of bloodborne exposures they had experienced and reported. Sixty-seven (32.8 percent) reported experiencing 109 occupational exposures (OEs) to blood or other potentially infectious materials. This corresponds to an OE rate of 80 +/- 7.7 exposures/100 person-years, far in excess of the highest recorded student rate (7.18 +/- 0.52) in a previous study. Twenty-six students (39 percent) reported two or more exposures each. Only 19 percent of exposures were reported to the school counselor, with 35 percent reported by third-year students and only 14.5 percent by fourth-year students. Thus the large differential in reported exposure rates between third- and fourth-year students found in our earlier study might have been an artifact of the sharply different reporting rates of these two groups. These results suggest an urgent need to reexamine the reliability of the present reporting system for such OEs. Also this study indicates that the gender differences in OE rates reported in our earlier study were due primarily to differential reporting by male and female students, not differences in their underlying OE rates.