JBSA-Lackland lab producing face shields for health care workers

SAN ANTONIO – A group of biomedical engineers at JBSA-Lackland changed up their daily routines in order to make face shields for health care workers who need them.

The engineers typically work in medical labs at the Air Force postgraduate dental school, creating surgical guides and other medical devices used by residents at Brooke Army Medical Center and Wilford Hall Medical Center.

They’ve now developed a way to 3-D print components of face shields that can be easily pieced together and shipped off to medical providers.

The lab can produce 25 face shields every 10 hours.

COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the new virus, stands for coronavirus disease 2019. The disease first appeared in late 2019 in Wuhan, China, but spread around the world in early 2020, causing the World Health Organization to declare a pandemic in March.

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