Featured Articles: Endoscope Tests

Manual cleaning is ‘most important step’ Although rare, numerous outbreaks of disease transmission to patients have been documented and traced back to contaminated endoscopes. In some cases, lapses in proper cleaning and disinfection were discovered. But in other cases, no lapse was ever found. Persistent contamination concerns are fueling an ongoing discussion among researchers and…

Surveillance cultures can help assess a facility’s reprocessing procedures Microbial testing assesses the “bioburden” of an item, which is the total count of bacterial and fungal colony-forming units, or CFUs, per sample. Microbial testing is used as routine surveillance for pathogens, or in the event of an outbreak. It is performed after endoscope disinfection, sterilization,…