Microbial Contamination of Endoscopes After Manual Cleaning

Microbial contamination of hospital reusable cleaning towels.

BACKGROUND Hospital cleaning practices are critical to the prevention of nosocomial infection transmission. To this end, cloth towels soaked in disinfectants are commonly used to clean and disinfect hospital surfaces. Cloth cleaning towels have been linked to an outbreak of Bacillus cereus and have been shown to reduce the effectiveness of commonly used quaternary ammonium disinfectants. Thus, ...

Microbial surface contamination after standard operating room cleaning practices following surgical treatment of infection.

At the authors' institution, some joint arthroplasty surgeons require the operating room to be terminally cleaned before using the room after infected cases, in theory to decrease exposure to excessive microbial contamination for the subsequent patient. The authors found no guidance in the literature to support this practice. To test this theory, the authors measured microbial surface contamina...

Lumens and endoscopes: meeting cleaning basics.

Impact of prescribed cleaning and disinfectant use on microbial contamination in the home.

AIMS To identify and quantify the presence of Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Salmonella, hepatitis A and norovirus in households and to assess the effect of chlorine and quaternary ammonium-based disinfectants following a prescribed use. METHODS AND RESULTS Eleven sites distributed in kitchen, bathroom, pet and children's areas of two groups of 30 homes each: (i) a nonprescribed dis...

Atmospheric Pressure Plasma Cleaning of Contamination Surfaces

Technical Description of the Work Decommissioning of transuranic waste (TRU) into low-level radioactive waste (LLW) represents the largest cleanup cost associated with the nuclear weapons complex. This work is directed towards developing a low-cost plasma technology capable of converting TRU into LLW, based upon highly selective plasma etching of plutonium and other actinides from contaminated ...