Nancy Aelick - Vice President

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VICE PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE – January 2014

Nancy Aelick

In November, Louis Konstant and I attended the World Sterilization Forum in Turkey. This was truly an amazing experience. The World Conference was very well organized with speakers from Germany, Peru, United Kingdom, Turkey, France, Canada, Belgium, Japan, The Netherlands, Australia, Ireland, Austria and the United States. There were 1,850 delegates, 1,300 being from Turkey.

There were many topics covered from scopes to prions to instrumentation, to how do we get infection and new technologies, experimenting with copper as a natural microbial eliminating the spread of infection, as well as many others.

There were many vendor booths and interesting ideas and technologies, with the newest being an automated autoclave transfer cart that unloads the sterilizer with the push of a button.

We were able to speak with the leaders of the Disinfection Antisepsis Sterilization Society (DAS). The organizations main goal is to carry out training and alert the related institutions in order to increase the sterilization and disinfection awareness in Turkey and reach "0 (zero) infection" rate in the hospital infections. More information can be found on their website at http://www.das.org/.

CSA STANDARDS

Z314.3 Steam Sterilization The new edition draft, CSA Z314.3 Effective sterilization in health care settings by the steam process, is now available for review and comment from November 19, 2013 – January 20, 2014 on the CSA Public Review Site (publicreview.csa.ca). Following Public Review, the Technical Subcommittee on Moist Heat will meet to review and disposition any comments received during the winter meetings in February.

Please check the CSAO website CSA for a link to a Health Canada Scientific Advisory panel document on difficult to clean medical devices. It will be helpful for MDRD departments.