Well, parts of MO are at least 20 years behind the times, but I would be interested in hearing from asanta and others in health care.

Occam. - 15 July 2012 12:47 PM

I suppose they might have burned sulfur to fumigate a room in the distant past, but there are a lot better disinfectants. Washing things down with bleach then closing the room so the hypochloric acid vapors build up should wipe out just about all life in the room.  Setting up an ozone generator and closing the room would also do a great job. 

But, in any case, when finished they should open the windows and use a good sized fan to suck all the stuff out so there would be no smell left.  Sounds like the people in your hospitals are too busy, too lazy, or too uninformed to do all that, Mriana.

I’m sure Asanta and Macgyver can shed much more expert light on this.

Occam

Bleach doesn’t kill everything.  Cryptosporidium, for example, is immune to bleach.  There are other diseases as well, which can’t be killed by it.  I think hepatitis might be one.

And again, you have to worry about the pathogens building up a resistance to whatever cleaning agent you’re using.  High heat is probably the best thing, but its a little difficult to stick a whole building in an autoclave.  So the next best thing would be to rotate the cleaning agents.

I found it hard to believe any living organic material would be resistant to bleach so I checked it out.  You are right in that, at standard concentrations, the cysts are quite resistant.  It would take very high concentrations of hydrochlorous acid to kill it.  That’s almost certainly the reason that in my backpacking days, there was a recommendation not to use bleach to decontaminate stream water for drinking, but rather to boil or use tincture of iodine.  Gave the water an interesting flavor, but we were at least happy that we would have been protected from radioactive iodine if there had been a nuclear facility melt-down near us.

Occam

At the end of “The Hot Zone”, the author describes how the sterilized the building where the Reston Ebola outbreak occurred.  They had no real idea of how best to kill the virus so that they could be certain that none of it survived.  So they fumigated the building with a nasty chemical which is believed to be able to kill everything.  They then sealed the building and let it sit.  Hoping that did the trick.

Yeah, it isn’t that those chemicals are “nasty”, just that they are so reactive that they react with the protein, etc. in the cells of the organism, including people.  Formaldehyde is one example, ethylene oxide is another.

Occam