Abstract
Two articles in this month's journal focus on specific areas of controversy in the reprocessing of flexible gastrointestinal endoscopes between patient use. In the study by Urayama et al.,1 the authors demonstrated that manual cleaning of endoscopes heavily contaminated with laboratory-cultured mycobacteria (102 colony forming units per instrument) resulted in greater than a 104 log reduction in numbers of viable cells recovered when the biopsy channels of five instruments were sampled. However, using two laboratory assay methods, they also showed that extending the endoscope exposure time in 2% alkaline glutaraldehyde from 10 to 20 minutes (presumably at room temperature) did not completely eradicate the mycobacterial inocula in the channels.
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