All dental equipment, medical autoclaves, and surgical equipment are known to widely use paper and plastic pouches for packaging their materials for sterilization preparation. Thailand is the only country where these sterilization paper packages are re-used whereas the rest of the world it’s a once-off use policy even though it is sterilized.
With over six thousand seven hundred and twenty types of paper/plastic pouches it’s divided into four different experimental pouches:
- One time
- Three times
- Five times
- Re-sterilized
Sterility for filter paper is determined for sterility once transferred into microbial cultivation, once removed from the opened pouch at the end of a storage period of up to six months, where this same filter paper was placed, sealed in and sterilized.
To validate these procedures, Positive and negative controls were used. Microbial contamination showed in all the sterilization filter papers in the positive control group contrarily to all the other filter paper groups including the negative control group.
So why Sterilization Paper or plastic:
One of the most important and critical aspects of sterilization is the packaging. this plays an important role in preventing microbial contamination from the external environment after the sterilization process and preserving that sterilization.
All pouches made from this sterile paper and plastic are inspected before and after the pouch has been sterilized. Because of plastic’s transparency, it is always used with the paper as the preferred package material for the autoclaving sterilization process due to the convenience of efficacy and content visibility.
Composed from complex cellulose fibers the paper end is fused and sealed to the laminated transparent polyester polypropylene plastic side on both sides using heat. This packaging usually comes in a roll of different sizes—width and length of roll—which has the sides already heat sealed.
To use this packaging you usually cut off the length you need and then heat seal the bottom to make a sort of packet with the top open. You then insert your equipment, usually washed with a light sterilization liquid if new or if used before to get off anything left on the instrument.
Usually, only one item is inserted per packet and then you heat seal the top end, ending up with a sealed package that goes to the CSSD department at the hospital or if in a small practice, like dentists and tattoo parlors, they have their own autoclave sterilizers and water sterilizer.
So by using this process of sterilization, using paper and plastic, you not only save lives but prevent infections, also sterilization paper is biodegradable making it a green product.
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