1. Reducing oral contamination during corneal scrapes
- Author
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Stephanie L Watson, Mark D. P. Willcox, Debarun Dutta, Yi-Chiao Li, Nicole Carnt, and Chameen Samarawickrama
- Subjects
0303 health sciences ,medicine.medical_specialty ,business.industry ,Negative control ,Contamination ,corneal scrape ,Streptococcus species ,3. Good health ,Surgery ,Face masks ,Agar plate ,03 medical and health sciences ,Ophthalmology ,Surgical mask ,contamination ,0302 clinical medicine ,030221 ophthalmology & optometry ,medicine ,Original Article ,business ,030304 developmental biology - Abstract
Aims: To identify potential contaminants of the corneal sampling procedure and examine the effect of wearing surgical face masks on the rate of contamination. Methods: Ten surgeons recited out loud a 30 s standardised script for corneal scraping with blood agar plates positioned 30 cm away from them. Three groups were identified: in group 1 a surgical mask was worn; group 2 had no mask worn; and group 3 had no mask but used agar plates pretreated with 5% povidone-iodine as a negative control. Each surgeon repeated the process 10 times for all groups, totalling 30 plates per surgeon and 300 plates for the experiment. All plates were masked and incubated aerobically at 37°C for 24 hours, and the number of colony forming units (CFUs) was determined. Results: At 24 hours, group 1 had a mean of 0.3 CFUs per surgeon; group 2 had 6.4 CFUs per surgeon and group 3 had 0.1 CFUs per surgeon. The difference between group 1 and group 2 was significant (p
- Published
- 2017