Low Temp Sterilization Expert | Jean-Luc Lemyre

Our medical devices are now cleaned, dried, and packaged. Nice job! Now, let’s put this load in the next sterilizer available in the SPD. Not so fast! Every sterilizer has validated sets of claims and limitations that you should know. This is also true for every cycle of a sterilizer. The fastest cycle is not…

Vaporized hydrogen peroxide sterilizers used in SPD perform a terminal sterilization process. It’s terminal because the devices processed are packaged to maintain their sterility until opening at the point of use. In comparison, liquid chemical sterilization is not a terminal process and does not result in sterile devices since they can get contaminated by microorganisms…

Proper cleaning, rinsing, and drying of medical devices are critical steps to successful low temperature sterilization. While the importance of cleaning is obvious to most people, why is drying so significant? To understand this, we should first discuss how water behaves under low pressure. Low temperature sterilization starts by evacuating the chamber of all its…

Continuing from our last post around routine monitoring, let’s jump into biological indicators (BI) and process challenge devices (PCD). BIs contain a microorganism resistant to an intended sterilization cycle and are used to confirm its lethality. For terminal sterilization using H2O2, it always contains at least a million viable spores of Geobacillus stearothermophilus. The BI…

In our last post, we addressed the idea that the sterility of devices cannot be directly verified before using them on a patient. For this reason, sterilization processes are subject to rigorous validations by manufacturers, which in turn are reflected in a sterilizer’s instructions for use. Successful sterilization relies on the routine monitoring that must…

Sterilization of reusable medical devices is a great thing to prevent patient infection, but how do we know a medical device is sterile? Well, the sterility of medical devices cannot be directly verified prior to clinical use. For this reason, sterilization processes themselves must be validated. The goal of this validation is to confirm the…

When a hydrogen peroxide solution is vaporized, its molecules are freed from one another to travel the world in gaseous form. In an SPD, this world they travel is the chamber of a low temperature sterilizer and the medical devices it contains. This gaseous state allows the reactive H2O2 molecules to reach deep into these…

Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) is a small and simple molecule with a formula close to water but having somewhat different properties. Across industries, H2O2 solutions are used in many ways. For instance, in textiles it is commonly used as a bleaching agent, while in the aerospace industry it is known as a rocket propellant. H2O2 comes…