Steve Ardagh, CEO and co-founder of New Zealand company Eagle Protect, is helping protect US police from fentanyl drug contact risk.
A New Zealand company is making inroads into the US law enforcement protective glove market where it says cops now treat a public encounter as a potential fentanyl drug danger.
Eagle Protect chief executive Steve Ardagh says overdoses and fatalities from fentanyl, a highly potent synthetic opioid now commonly cut into recreational drugs like heroin because it’s cheap, are a “massive” problem in the US.
Frontline services and school teachers also want extra protection from it in their safety gloves, Ardagh says.
His company, which has been importing its own specification high-quality protective gloves for New Zealand’s food and health sectors for more than 20 years, and into the US since 2016, has in response developed a fentanyl-resistant glove now used by seven US sheriffs’ departments. The gloves are made in Malaysia.
Medical literature defines fentanyl as 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine. Its main clinical use is in pain management for cancer patients and recovery from painful surgery.
Ardagh says US police told him they worried people they arrested or had close contact with at an incident “had little flakes of this stuff on their bodies and they just want that extra protection”.
“Also in school districts where they search students every morning ... which is pretty sad in itself.”
Prison officers are also customers.
Eagle Protect is working to distinguish itself as a trusted provider of high-quality, premium-priced gloves and a research leader in a trade which has a dark “underbelly”, according to Arnagh.
He shares horror stories about the potential health dangers of cheap, untested and unpoliced imported protective gloves. That’s aside from their high failure and ripping rates, highlighted in the Covid pandemic.
But first, some facts about the trade.
New Zealand is estimated to use between 300 million and 500 million gloves a year - most of which go to the landfill. (Ardagh says there are biodegradable options, and a lot of work is being done in this area, but there are problems with microplastic residues. Wasted gloves are also a problem. Ardagh says nurses have told him they can try six gloves before they get an intact pair.)
In the US, 328 million gloves are used in a day, he says.
Most nitrile (petrochemical-based/synthetic rubber) gloves, including Eagle Protect’s range, are made in Southeast Asia.
The reason? According to Arnagh, it is because originally most gloves were made from rubber and the manufacturing industry was built around Southeast Asia’s rubber trees. Also, manufacturing is labour and energy-intensive, he says.
“A number of factories have gone up in the US in response to the pandemic because there were huge shortages, but they’re really struggling. They were promised government contracts but it doesn’t seem to be happening.
“It [manufacturing] is not economically viable [in New Zealand] because of the energy costs, the labour costs. It would have to be something the Government backed, and I’m sure there’s a long list of things they would want to spend money on before this.”
Now for some of Ardagh’s war stories.
He says while the US Food and Drug Administration’s food handling compliance standard for protective gloves is nearly 30 pages long, and is the standard for New Zealand’s meat and other food industries, the rules only concern chemical content and handling.
“The one thing it doesn’t say is that the glove needs to be clean or intact.
“We decided about six years ago this wasn’t good enough. So we started a research project with a microbiologist in the US. We wanted a test we could do quickly on our gloves when they came into a country to show they were clean and intact. I’m not saying sterile, but clear of bad things.
”He tested 26 brands of imported food and medical gloves. We were blown away by the results.”
Ardagh says more than 50 per cent of all gloves arriving in the US that were tested indicated human faecal matter. The project also revealed pathogens including listeria, e-coli, salmonella and aspergillus, a common mould. He says scientific papers written after newborn babies died of aspergillus in US hospitals in the early 2000s traced their deaths back to protective gloves.
“The gloves weren’t tested in New Zealand, but they come from the same factories. They’re arriving pre-contaminated.”
“Our focus is to highlight that just because it says something on the box, it’s not necessarily what’s in the box. You can have a box that says the gloves are fentanyl resistant. That could mean the one glove that was tested was resistant but not the ones in the box. That’s why I say the industry is lazy. We’ve talked to many in the industry and they said it’s because people don’t care, they just want a cheap product.
“Even if the chemical content for example is part of FDA compliance in New Zealand, no-one ever checks the gloves. It’s an honesty system with these factories in Southeast Asia, and we know from experience, that’s not a great strategy.
The Ministry of Health has been approached for comment on the policing of glove imports.
After the shock test results, Eagle Protect developed a process to test gloves. A paper written about the project and its findings has just been accepted for publication after peer review by a US protection industry body, says Ardagh.
He hopes the paper may help change the trade’s poor reputation.
Eagle Protect’s range of nitrile and latex gloves is made by just three companies in Thailand and Malaysia where his company closely monitors production.
Ardagh can’t guarantee its gloves won’t rip but says the company’s supply contract with quality-demanding retail chain Costco in the US suggests it produces a superior product.
“The other big thing we say is that you’ve got to have the right glove for the process. If you’re a butcher, you need a different glove to a dental assistant.”
Eagle Products, current annual revenue $20 million, was started in 2006 by Ardagh and his wife Lynda Ronaldson. It also imports PPE clothing.
In New Zealand, It supplies 80 per cent of companies involved in the meat, seafood, dairy and poultry sectors, Ardagh says. It has an office in California and has just signed a distribution agreement for Canada with a company that also operates in Ireland and Europe.
Word getting around in the US about Eagle Protect’s products also brings growing pains.
A Colorado hospital which uses 1000 cases of gloves every three weeks recently approached the company.
“Of course we said yes, but the answer is no. You say yes first and then think how the hell we’re going to do this. There’s a three or four-month wait time with the factories because of things like shipping schedules. You have to have the product on the ground, close by, especially in the US because the usage can be so huge,” says Ardagh.
“We’re working through that strategic puzzle now. How do we grow safely but take up this post-pandemic opportunity with people really looking at health and cleanliness?
Revenue is split equally between New Zealand and the US. There are 10 staff in each country.
Ardagh and his wife, who is the marketing manager, own just over 50 per cent of the company. A few key managers hold 15 per cent, and the company’s Thailand manufacturer has around 8 per cent. Sir Stephen Tindall’s start-up support vehicle K1W1 and Ngai Tahu have small shareholdings, along with about 20 friends and family members.
The company is contemplating a capital raise of around US$2m ($3.3m) as it works on a strategy to become a $50m business.
“We think we can be a $100m company within a very short time, say three to four years,” says Ardagh.
“We supply around eight hours of US annual demand for gloves. So we’ve got 364.5 days of the market to grow in.”
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