There aren’t many preps so versatile you can buy them everywhere from medical supply houses to tool shops, or equally useful for keeping the smell of gun solvent off your hands and keeping you Ebola-free; but nitrile gloves fit the bill. Salty and I talk over their particulars in this podcast:
Why nitrile gloves?
Nitrile gloves are cheap (about $7 for a box of 500 last time I bought some), flexible, pretty comfortable, and allow you to retain a good tactile sense. You can feel what your fingers are doing in nitrile. They’re also amazingly resistant to chemical attack and impervious to microbes. Everything from strong acids to strong bases and all the nasty solvents in between gnaw in vain at the wall of nitrile.
What’s wrong with good old latex gloves?
Latex gloves were pretty wonderful, but had two real problems. One is that many people are allergic to latex. Somewhere between five and ten percent of Americans have latex allergies. Protecting someone’s hands from touching an irritant by giving them a rash all over their hands is not exactly making progress.
A second problem is that when latex gloves get wet, handling anything feels like trying to grab a wet ice cube. You’ve got no purchase at all and things go slipping floorward with regularity. Nitrile has a much better grip when wet. Vinyl gloves are even worse for being slippery when wet; I hates them forever.
Buying and storing nitrile gloves
While there are some differences in quality among glove grades (surgical medical vs.exam vs. industrial use), I haven’t found the quality differences to be impressive. The differences in costs are impressive. I for one just go with fairly cheap ones; normal exam grade or industrial grade. I find the blue ones are often a little better quality than the off-white versions but that might be just a quirk of my suppliers.
Size can be important though. Trying to wear a glove that’s too small is just annoying, but at least if it fails there’s no doubt at all that it’s failed. You can wear gloves that are too big, but they Adore getting caught on every dang thing you handle. You don’t want gloves failing during use, so that’s what we call a Bad Thing. It’s worth it to buy the right size for each user.
Any looser than this and the glove material starts getting pinched in things you handle, increasing failure risk.
They do oxidize over time, and age more rapidly when exposed to air, light, and/or heat. I’ve noticed the most exposed gloves in a box getting yellowed and brittle after perhaps two or three years of air/light exposure in mild temperatures. If you’re buying them as preps, vacuum packing in an air-tight bucket or something similar would be in order.
Proper removal of gloves is important
One thing a lot of people don’t know about is how to remove the gloves without contaminating the hands. It’s a simple technique, but worth following. We made a YouTube video to demonstrate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49W3fUok5zA&t
Basically, the first glove is removed by pinching the outside of the lower palm of the glove and stripping it off inside out. That glove is balled up and held in the other hand while the now-bare fingers slip under the wrist of the glove that’s still on, so bare fingers touch only the inside surface. Strip off the second glove (the first one ends up inside the second) and toss them into a biohazard container.
First you pinch the palm of one hand close to the wrist.
Then you strip the first glove off, turning it inside out.
You remove the second glove by stripping it off inside out, after having slid your fingers inside the cuff to begin.
A biohazard container can be an cardboard box or some such with a trash bag inside it, so long as the box can later be sealed and disposed of without anyone ever touching the contents or removing the bag. This reduces risk of exposure to bag contents from spills.
The good news is also the bad news with nitrile gloves
Nitrile gloves are pretty puncture-resistant, but they can fail. They are designed to fail spectacularly when the do go. Once they get even a pinhole, they will rip in pieces at the least stress. Why? If a glove does have a breach, it’s much better that the user know it and immediately stops and cleans his hands than that the user imagine his protection is complete. It’s just something to keep in mind. There are some jobs for which that feature is a problem and you’d want to choose a different hand protection.
These gloves are really pretty puncture resistant, although failure is possible.
This is what a tiny cut and a gentle pull give you: Complete failure.
I always keep a half dozen pairs of nitrile gloves in my first aid kits and boxes of them throughout my house, I use them for things like cooking when handling certain things like hot peppers, I use them when cleaning my guns, my wife is a nurse so I got schooled on proper use but I have never found any that fit loose like the guy demonstrating how to take them off.
Well Jerry, I’ve got to admit: Salty’s gloves were on top, so I just grabbed a couple of his. I wouldn’t wear ones that loose for any critical work, but it didn’t seem to make a difference for showing removal, so I didn’t dig for my box.