Having necessary medical devices, supplies and equipment are critical for hospitals and clinics to continue delivering high quality care to patients. The healthcare community relies on foreign companies, especially China, for medical equipment and supplies, even raw materials and spare parts to replenish our factories manufacturing products including medical devices right here in the USA...

Let’s talk about rinsing, whether its dishes, your hair, salad fixings or medical devices. Doesn’t sound all that glamorous does it? Right up there with taking out the trash and many other chores that need to be done. That’s why they’re called chores after all. Truth is rinsing is really, really important, and yet is often overlooked or simply not done well enough because it takes time...

Last week, we discussed the value of utilizing high purity RO water for cleaning and rinsing. This week, we are faced with a continuing problem of residue remaining on surgical devices. I’ve been in this industry for over thirty years and only recently heard about the frequency of white powder residue on containers and even on single use wrap after sterilization...

It is late October, a time when apples are pressed into cider, leaves turn to vibrant autumn colors and Halloween horror movies scare and thrill audiences. While the names of monsters, ghosts and ghouls in these movies change, there are some recurring themes that are common to all of them including dangers lurking in hidden places, unexpected twists, secret weapons and of course, sequels. In a horror movie starring SPD professionals ...

Gels can preserve tissue and bioburden under a tough to remove clear coating. Jurassic Park, the book and movie was based on the notion that mosquitos were so well persevered in amber that dinosaur DNA could be recovered after millions of years. Well, pre-cleaning gels work much the same way, after a short time a sticky skin forms on the gel, trapping the debris beneath and becoming virtually impervious to cleaning. Enter the pre-cleaning gel, easy to use, and convenient, made to prevent soil from drying onto used instruments; is it wet or just an illusion?

Many people still don’t know that fruits and other produce bought from the grocery store are covered with a thin layer of wax to prevent spoilage. Removing the wax is as easy as soaking the produce in a solution of water and baking soda for 15 minutes. The alkaline solution will dissolve the wax, and any pesticides leaving you with safe/healthy produce after a light rinse...

When I was a teenager, I didn’t know how to protect my skin from the sun.  I used a visor to capture the sun’s rays and baby oil to bronze and darken my skin to get a deep tan.  It was what all my friends did.

 “If you don't rinse your dishes after washing them, you'll still have food residue and bacteria on them. Plus, you've mixed the residue of ALL your dishes together. So if one of them had something bad on it, now they all do.” 

Remember the scene in the Graduate when Dustin Hoffman’s future father-in-law tells him to go into PLASTICS, the growing industry at the time, one of mankind’s greatest innovations.  When we started Case Medical thirty years ago manufacturing custom trays out of metal, we were told the same thing.  PLASTIC was the best material for all things in our industry…

Sometimes we get too involved in the details of a problem to look at the situation as a whole. Few recent scientific discoveries have captured the public’s imagination quite like the wood-wide web — a wispy network of fungal filaments hypothesized to shuttle nutrients and information through the soil and to help forests thrive. Scientists and nonscientists alike have posited that shared fungal networks are ubiquitous in forests around the world...