There are currently no WHO guidelines on the indications for semen culture; however, semen cultures are performed in the evaluation of male infertility and the assisted reproductive technology (ART) process. The relevance and significance of positive semen cultures is widely debated in the literature, with no current consensus on the usefulness of this test in relation to male infertility. We r...

There are many standards and recommendations for breathing air quality associated with respiratory protection equipment, but little has been done regarding the possible microbial contamination of medical air. The present study demonstrates quantitatively and qualitatively that pipelines might be incriminated as source of microbial contamination of compressed and synthetic air for medical use. A...

ÐMeasurement of lepton contamination is achieved across a radiotherapy photon beam and peripheral doses using radiochromic ®lm. An extrapolation technique is used where several layers are suspended in air to measure incident contamination without the e€ects of phantom scatter. Surface dose was measured as 11% of Dmax for 6 MV beams at central axis and 9% for 10 MV photons for a 10 10 cm ®eld si...

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), most health care-associated infections (HAIs) are caused by contamination from the hands of health care providers or patients, contamination from the environment, and contamination from the patient's own skin. To mitigate common sources of infection transmission, frontline health care providers must be compliant with basic infec...

OBJECTIVES Blood culture contamination is a common problem in the emergency department (ED) that leads to unnecessary patient morbidity and health care costs. The study objective was to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of a quality improvement (QI) intervention for reducing blood culture contamination in an ED. METHODS The authors developed a QI intervention to reduce blood culture cont...

Campylobacter jejuni and C. coli are the leading causes of enteric infections in many developed countries. Healthy chickens are considered to act as reservoirs of campylobacters, as the organisms colonize the intestinal tract. Once infected birds enter a processing plant, contamination of chicken carcasses with campylobacters occurs over the entire skin during defeathering and evisceration due ...

We determined risk factors for hand contamination and compared the efficacy of 3 randomly allocated hand hygiene agents in a group of surgical intensive care unit nurses. We cultured samples of one of the subjects' hands before and samples of the other hand after hand hygiene was performed. Ring wearing was associated with 10-fold higher median skin organism counts; contamination with Staphyloc...

A total of 360 samples including fresh fecal droppings, neck skins, and swab samples was collected from 24 broiler flocks and processed by 12 modern processing plants in 6 states in Malaysia. Ninety samples from 10 traditional wet markets located in the same states as modern processing plants were also collected. Microbiological isolation for Campylobacter was performed following ISO 10272-1:20...

BACKGROUND Although blood pressure cuffs are commonly used and shared in medical facilities, their routine disinfection is performed infrequently. AIMS We investigated the contamination of blood pressure cuffs by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). METHODS The MRSA level on the inner side (the surface in contact with patients' skin) of blood pressure cuffs used in the wards ...

We evaluated the microbial contamination of 17 types of vegetable and 10 types of fruit after 30-s washing with tap water with and without subsequent disinfection by 10-min immersion in 0.01% (100 ppm) sodium hypochlorite. The mean microbial contamination level of 9 types of leafy vegetable was 2.8 x 10(5) colony-forming units (CFU)/g after washing with water and 3.4 x 10(4) CFU/g after washing...