Pre-disinfection-cleaning: crucial steps to guarantee sterilization.

The objective of reprocessing Medical Devices is to achieve an extremely low Safety Assurance Level (SAL) of 10-6, in other words, the acceptance of one non-sterile unit in a million. EN13060, standard for small steam sterilizers, stipulates: ”The survival of a microorganism can be expressed in terms of probability reduced to a very low number…which can never be zero”. This lecture will emphasize how much the fundamental pre-disinfection and cleaning steps contribute to reducing the initial microbial population, and thus achieving the aimed SAL of 10-6. The sterilization phase “alone” is not capable of eliminating an excessive microbial load and reach this goal.