Miller D M, Youkhana I, Karunaratne W U, Pearce A
Guy's, King's College and St. Thomas' Hospitals' Medical and Dental School, London, UK.
Anaesthesia. 2001 Nov;56(11):1069-72. doi: 10.1046/j.1365-2044.2001.02277.x.
Twenty previously used and supposedly clean, sterilised laryngeal mask airways, five bougies and five Magill forceps from the operating theatre, and 61 laryngoscope blades from different sites within a single hospital were randomly collected and stained with erythrosin B dye, which stains proteins if present on surfaces. All 20 laryngeal mask airways had been used before and were stained: four (20%) showed heavy staining, five (25%) moderate staining and 11 (55%) mild staining. Two unused laryngeal mask airways used as controls were without staining. Thirty-four of 44 (77%) laryngoscope blades taken from the operating theatres, six of seven (86%) from the overnight intensive recovery room and all 10 (100%) from the wards were stained. None of the other items was totally clean. These findings suggest that current cleaning methods do not remove all proteinaceous material.
