Irrigation of subcutaneous tissue with povidone-iodine solution for prevention of surgical wound infections.

Five hundred patients undergoing a variety of general surgical operative procedures were prospectively randomly allocated into a treatment group, in which the incisions were irrigated with povidone-iodine solution prior to skin closure or into a control group in which wounds were irrigated with saline solution. Wounds were classified according to the degree of bacterial contamination as clean, potentially contaminated, contaminated or dirty. For all categories of surgical incisions, povidone-iodine irrigation resulted in a significant decrease in wound infections over that for saline solution irrigation. Over-all incidence of wound sepsis in the treatment group was seven of 242 patients, 2.9 per cent, compared with the control rate of 39 wound infections of 258 patients, 15.1 per cent--p less than 0.001.