Pickling and Passivation -- Sterilize Your Tools

When you're working in the medical field,
cleanliness is not just next to godliness; it's everything. Back
before sterilization became a normal part of practicing medicine,
more people died of infection from treatment than from their
original injuries or diseases. These days, sterilization is pretty
commonplace, and almost reflexive.

Passivation
is a part of the process that helps with
medical device cleaning.
This is a process that forms a protective coating over metal in
order to strengthen it and to improve its appearance and give it a
smoother surface, giving bacteria less places to hide. It can
prevent infection and promote sterility.
The most common

pickling
and
passivation
technique is to use metal oxides to form a protective layer
over the metal instrument in order to protect it from corrosion, to
strengthen it against damage, and to make it easier to sterilize.
This is an important step in
medical device cleaning,
to make sure that the instruments being used are effectively
disinfected every time you clean them, so that they next patient
that they're used on is not exposed to the germs and other
contaminants that the previous patient was dealing with. Sterility
is very important in the control and prevention of disease.

Passivation

is
not only important for the health of the patients, but also for the
health of the physicians and medical personnel such as nurses and
medical assistants. These are the people who are handling these
tools all day, who have to perform the actual
medical device cleaning.
These are the people who are exposed to the most contaminants
because they're dealing with multiple patients throughout the day.
If you want to protect your own health, then you should be thankful
that these procedures exist. They exist to protect you from
infection, as well as to protect the patients that these tools are
being used on.
Most laymen don't know much about
passivation, but that
doesn't mean that they don't benefit from it. It's good that such a
technique exists to prevent the spread of disease, and not everyone
has to know what it is in order for it to be effective. But if you
have to do any
medical device cleaning,
you should be thankful for it, and for the protection it affords to
you. And it also makes it a lot easier for you to keep your tools
and devices clean and germ-free to prevent the spread of
disease.