When 'clean' is not clean enough
Thursday, December 22, 2011 - 17:00
in Health & Medicine
Some solutions are just no-brainers. Take medical backboards, for example, those hard plastic boards used to stabilize patients during emergencies before the patient is lifted onto the gurney and hurried into the ambulance. After each call, technicians scrub down their equipment to avoid exposing the next patient to diseases, microbes or bodily fluids, but despite these efforts, a study conducted in partnership with the University of Miami examined 55 "cleaned" active-duty backboards and found that every backboard was contaminated with at least 11 different strains of bacteria and microorganisms.