Posted on Nov 3, 2023
More medical gloves are coming from China, as U.S. makers of protective gear struggle
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https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/11/03/ [login to see] /medical-gloves-china-u-s-makers-personal-protective-gear-struggle
A 85-foot-tall, dark-gray building stands in southern Virginia, surrounded by grassy fields and rolling blue mountains. This brand-new chemical plant was set up during the pandemic to produce a special type of synthetic rubber that's needed to make medical exam gloves, the kind used everyday by doctors and nurses.
But so far, this factory has produced nothing.
About 340 miles northeast, in Maryland, another brand-new factory sits idle and unfinished. This one was designed to take that kind of synthetic rubber and transform it into medical gloves. It's a 735,000-square-foot building full of equipment, but the machines inside of it have not been fully set up.
A 85-foot-tall, dark-gray building stands in southern Virginia, surrounded by grassy fields and rolling blue mountains. This brand-new chemical plant was set up during the pandemic to produce a special type of synthetic rubber that's needed to make medical exam gloves, the kind used everyday by doctors and nurses.
But so far, this factory has produced nothing.
About 340 miles northeast, in Maryland, another brand-new factory sits idle and unfinished. This one was designed to take that kind of synthetic rubber and transform it into medical gloves. It's a 735,000-square-foot building full of equipment, but the machines inside of it have not been fully set up.
More medical gloves are coming from China, as U.S. makers of protective gear struggle
Posted from npr.org
China
Medical
Health
Posted 6 mo ago
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PO1 William "Chip" Nagel good day Brother William, always informational and of the most interesting. Thanks for sharing, have a blessed day!
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PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
..."The only facility in the U.S.
A close examination of one key medical item — medical exam gloves — illustrates why manufacturing this protective gear has proven so difficult.
Over 100 billion basic exam gloves get used each year in the United States, and business executive Scott Maier says that all but a tiny fraction of them come from Asia.
Even before the pandemic, Maier dreamed of manufacturing medical gloves on U.S. soil. He figured that with automation, he could get prices low enough to compete with makers in Malaysia, which had been the world's main glove supplier for years.
“That's what we were trying to do,” says Maier, the CEO of a company called Blue Star NBR. “But trying to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to make a commodity, before the pandemic, was not an easy feat.”
As a novel coronavirus began to race around the world in 2020, however, hospitals found themselves desperately short of PPE, with doctors and nurses forced to ration masks and gloves.
With the pandemic underscoring an urgent need to increase the on-shore production of these items, government officials scrambled to figure out what kinds of funding could be found and mobilized across various agencies.
Maier originally had a two-part plan to build a glove factory, plus a chemical plant that could churn out the raw material needed to make the gloves.
The Department of Defense announced in 2021 that “on behalf of and in coordination with” HHS, it would provide over $123 million for the chemical plant that would produce rubber.
Technically the rubber is called nitrile butadiene rubber, or NBR, and it's the preferred material for gloves these days because so many people have allergies to latex.
“This is the only facility in the U.S. that can make a medical-grade NBR,” Maier said during a recent tour of the facility, as he pointed out reactors and mixing tanks — all of which stand empty and unused.
When it's first made, the NBR is a white liquid that looks like viscous milk, and Blue Star NBR has been making test batches in a trailer near the plant, on the other side of some train tracks. One suitcase-sized container of it bore a sticker with an American flag that said “PROUDLY MADE IN USA.”...
..."The only facility in the U.S.
A close examination of one key medical item — medical exam gloves — illustrates why manufacturing this protective gear has proven so difficult.
Over 100 billion basic exam gloves get used each year in the United States, and business executive Scott Maier says that all but a tiny fraction of them come from Asia.
Even before the pandemic, Maier dreamed of manufacturing medical gloves on U.S. soil. He figured that with automation, he could get prices low enough to compete with makers in Malaysia, which had been the world's main glove supplier for years.
“That's what we were trying to do,” says Maier, the CEO of a company called Blue Star NBR. “But trying to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to make a commodity, before the pandemic, was not an easy feat.”
As a novel coronavirus began to race around the world in 2020, however, hospitals found themselves desperately short of PPE, with doctors and nurses forced to ration masks and gloves.
With the pandemic underscoring an urgent need to increase the on-shore production of these items, government officials scrambled to figure out what kinds of funding could be found and mobilized across various agencies.
Maier originally had a two-part plan to build a glove factory, plus a chemical plant that could churn out the raw material needed to make the gloves.
The Department of Defense announced in 2021 that “on behalf of and in coordination with” HHS, it would provide over $123 million for the chemical plant that would produce rubber.
Technically the rubber is called nitrile butadiene rubber, or NBR, and it's the preferred material for gloves these days because so many people have allergies to latex.
“This is the only facility in the U.S. that can make a medical-grade NBR,” Maier said during a recent tour of the facility, as he pointed out reactors and mixing tanks — all of which stand empty and unused.
When it's first made, the NBR is a white liquid that looks like viscous milk, and Blue Star NBR has been making test batches in a trailer near the plant, on the other side of some train tracks. One suitcase-sized container of it bore a sticker with an American flag that said “PROUDLY MADE IN USA.”...
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It's quite a challenging situation for those new factories, isn't it? The demand for medical gloves has been sky-high during the pandemic, and it's unfortunate to hear about these setbacks.
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