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Disinfection Testing

The saying goes,  “You can’t disinfect a dirty surface”.  

So why are there so many All-in-one cleaner disinfectant products on the market?

The TURI Lab and Department of Clinical Laboratory and Nutritional Sciences are working together to look at traditional cleaner-disinfectants to see how well they disinfect a dirty surface. In addition, evaluations will be conducted on newer, less toxic disinfecting products and equipment.
Disinfection in progress

Testing will investigate:

  •  disinfecting with and without cleaning
  •  how many surfaces can be wiped without transferring bacteria
  •  the affect of disinfecting less than required dwell time
  •  whether the residue left after killing microbes with a disinfectant provide a food source for the next batch of microbes that land.
Adding to the traditional bacteria testing methods using plates, the testing will evaluate methods to assess surface safety levels using more immediate assessment tools. Testing will attempt to correlate ATP measurement methods (as well as other real time measurement methods) to plate counts and other methods.
ATP measurement
 

TURI Lab Disinfection Testing will follow a three step process

  1.  Process development - Working with vendors to establish proposed protocols
  2.  Baseline run - Run supplied product following typical lab process
  3.  Real world testing - Operating disinfection under less than ideal situations
This page was updated, Wednesday February 27 2013