Goalie's not really right. I'm not up on the current High School or Friends and Family curriculium, but the BLS HeartSaver and BLS Health Care version still train rescue breaths with compressions.
AHA has said It's better for someone who is not trained at all to at least give compression and no breaths than nothing at all. They believe that fear of mouth to mouth reduces the number of untrained people to give CPR. That's the original point brought up.
One other change in current training is to set the mask to the side when doing CPR when not doing breaths. During compressions there is some exchange of oxygen. Covering the mouth would reduce that exchange. Science is showing breathing to be less important than in the past, but it's still one of the main pillars of CPR.
If it is still one of the main pillars, why, in ACLS, did they change the "best practice" of immediate intubation? Why do we use a different acronym instead of the ABC's now?
The bottom line is that if you cannot fix the actual cause, it all doesn't matter.
