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  • Introduction of chemo-thermal disinfection laundering procedures for hospital textiles [Elektronski vir]
    Fijan, Sabina ; Šostar-Turk, Sonja ; Fijan, Rebeka
    Results of different recent studies confirm the increase of nosocomial infections and the increase of microbial resistance. Therefore hospital hygiene is of great importance. One of the possible ... causes of nosocomial infections are inappropriately disinfected textiles. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate if the disinfection efficiency of laundering procedures for hospital textiles is appropriate. Washed hospital textiles shouldn't contain microorganisms that cause diseases because their users are patients with impaired immune systems and should therefore be protected from infections with inappropriately disinfected textiles. The combined trend to decrease the washing temperature, energy consumption, laundering agents etc., thus decreasing the laundering costs, as well as the trend of using blends of polyester and cotton for hospital textiles, which cannot withstand high laundering temperatures, has led to the omission of thermal laundering procedures and therefore enhancing the possibility that laundered textiles are not sufficiently safe for use by hospital patients. The thermal disinfection laundering effect is ensured by the duration of at least 10 min at 90 °C or 15 min at 85 °C, whilst the chemo-thermal disinfection laundering effect is ensured at much lower temperatures by the use of appropriate disinfection agents. The disinfection agents used at lower temperatures (such as hydrogen peroxide) are also much more environment-friendly than other disinfection agents used at higher temperatures. The aim of this study was to introduce chemo-thermal laundering procedures in a hospital laundry in order to reduce energy consumption, enable laundering for heat-susceptible textiles,introduce environmental friendly washing and disinfecting agents and at the same time ensure disinfection of textiles for further use. The disinfecting efficiency of different textile laundering procedures was assessed by determining the anti-bacterial laundering effect against representative microorganisms such as Enterococcus faecium and Staphylococcus aureus as standard hygiene indicators. Cotton samples artificially contaminated with a suspension of indicator microorganisms were introduced into the laundering procedures and the survival of each bioindicator was assessed by standard microbiological methods. Also, the wastewater quality of the thermal and chemo-thermal laundering procedures was determined in order to evaluate the environmental influence of each laundering procedure. The measured parameters (temperature, pH-value, suspended substances, sediment substances, free chlorine, total nitrogen, COD-value, BOD5-value, AOX-value, anionic surfactants, non-ionic surfactants) for the laundry wastewater were chosen according to the valid regulation of the Official Gazette of the Republic of Slovenia (Decree of substance emission during removal of wastewater from laundry and dry cleaning plants,No. 45, 2002) and compared with the limit values of emission into water. Results show that the chemo-thermal disinfection laundering effect was achieved and that the substance emission values were mainly within the tolerance limit values.
    Source: Conference proceedings [Elektronski vir] (7 f.)
    Type of material - conference contribution
    Publish date - 2005
    Language - english
    COBISS.SI-ID - 10081046

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