Analyser cleans up decontamination process

摘要

Washtak is a new product designed to manage, monitor and optimise clinical wash processes in hospital environments. Based on so-called TAK technology, it aims to ensure that post-operativc infections from "unclean" instruments become a thing of the past. Currently, after a procedure, operators check for residues of blood on the instruments, but there has been no quantifiable way of ensuring the instruments are indeed "clean". The research which led to the creation of TAK technology began over 10 years ago at the Health Protection Agency (HPA) in the UK. At the time there was a significant concern about the emergence of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) and its potential for spread through contaminated surgical instruments. vCJD can be transmitted via proteinaceous infectious particles, better known as prions. These prions adhere very well to stainless steel and are therefore very hard to remove in washing processes.