Hospitals are actively searching for new scope-cleaning solutions while the duodenoscopes are still on the market, and redesigning the reusable devices is not a solution in the short term, according to an article on the LA Times website.
Hospitals are turning to a wide variety of cleaning and testing approaches — including some that remain unproven, the article said.
Olympus Corp. controls 85 percent of the specialty endoscope market in the U.S., and its devices have been linked to six of the nine recent superbug outbreaks. This month, Olympus began shipping a tiny new brush to hospitals to help clean the tip of these scopes.
One cleaning approach is cleaning the scopes by hand before running them through an automated reprocessing machine for disinfection.
The next alternative is to repeat that cycle twice. The third approach is standard cleaning plus gas sterilization.
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