INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MICROBIOLOGY AND ALLIED SCIENCES

4

Authors: Suraiya Jabeen* ,Asia Neelam, Omm-e-hany, Sikander Khan Sherwani

With the dawn of the new century, dentistry has seen a new face in the fields of diagnosis, treatment and prevention. A peer-reviewed laboratory scale research was conducted to evaluate the cumulative state of knowledge related to toothbrush contamination and its possible role in disease transmission. Individuals were each supplied with a new toothbrush. After a period of one month i-e; four weeks, during which subjects were asked to follow their usual oral hygiene practices, the toothbrushes were collected and assayed for microbial contamination using a few selective growth media. Colonies of the most suspected micro-organisms like Enterococci, Staphylococci, Salmonella, Shigella and Pseudomonas spp were observed on the media plates. Quantitatively dominating genera were Staphylococci and Enterococci whose colonies were observed on MacConkey’s agar. However, no fungal colony was detected on any of the plates of Sabouraud’s Dextrose Agar.

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Authors: Tim Sandle

This paper examines the one of the most important tests required for products purportedly to be sterile: sterility test. Sterility is an absolute term: either something is sterile or it is not. The definition of sterility for pharmaceutical products is not a strict biological definition that would be based on ‘the total absence of viable life’. The sterility test only examines for those bacteria and fungi which can grow under the particular cultural conditions of the test. Even with this more limited ‘pharmaceutical definition’ of sterility, the term sterility cannot be proved, and it can only be quoted in terms of probability. One of the ways that the probability of sterility is given greater assurance is through the sterility test (Gilbert and Allison, 1996). Although today a significant number of experts question the need for sterility testing of a given batch that has terminally received validated amount of heat or irradiation sterilization conditions, most do agree that aseptically processed batches as well as gas sterilized batches (since the process is considered difficult to control) require proper testing and release. Several types of product are required to be sterile. These include parenterals, opthalmics and inhalations. By their very nature, a significant number of these types of products cannot be terminally sterilised. Biological vaccines may be destroyed by the sterilization process, for example, the influenza vaccine. Additionally, some products are prescribed to immunocompromised patients and therefore must be sterile to avoid causing harm (e.g. antibiotics delivered by inhalation for Cystic Fibrosis patients).