Injection Moulding Repurposing for Medical Supplies enabled by Additive Manufacturing

Injection Moulding Repurposing for Medical Supplies enabled by Additive Manufacturing

The modern world is fast-evolving, interconnected and highly mobile, thus posing a significant challenge in harmonizing risk mitigation measures against emerging biological hazards. For many years the risk of emerging infectious diseases with pandemic potential was declared a major threat to global health security and addressed by many stakeholders around the world. The delay in imposing risk mitigation measures is crucial and can make the difference between a local outbreak with few cases to a pandemic with countless sick and deceased citizens, as severely demonstrated by the recent outbreak of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). It is of paramount importance that appropriate and proportionate measures to each phase of the pandemic (e.g. from situations with no reported cases, sporadic, local clusters of cases, to widespread sustained transmission) are immediately implemented to interrupt human-to-human transmission chains, prevent further spread and reduce the intensity of COVID-19 outbreak. Immediate activation of national emergency response mechanisms and pandemic preparedness plans to ensure containment and mitigation of COVID-19 with non-pharmaceutical public health measures is critical for delaying transmission or decreasing the peak of the outbreak, in order to allow healthcare systems to prepare and cope with an increased influx of patients. However, shortages and other gaps in the global medical supply chain represent a mismatch of supply and demand when supply is low and/or demand is high for particular items. With healthcare workers and other first responders feeling the impact of supply chains disrupted by unprecedented challenges, many large and small businesses from outside the traditional healthcare procurement system are reconfiguring to mass produce critical medical consumables. In order to address supply shortages, particularly in medical supplies and protective equipment, some countries have employed less traditional instruments.