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Posted By Ian Stone
Can anyone give me some information on disinfecting tongs after picking up discarded needles?
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Rank: Guest
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Posted By Diane Thomason
Ian,
The disinfectant of choice is a chlorine-based bleach (e.g. Chloros) at a concentration of 10,000ppm available chlorine. This is what's generally in the literature for inactivating blood-borne viruses. An hour's soak should be plenty. Unfortunately this will eventually corrode your tongs though. A good alternative is Virkon disinfectant (which will also corrode the tongs!) If you can get plastic tongs/forceps you won't have the corrosion problem.
I don't know which sector you work in but if you are in a hospital/lab environment you could have them autoclaved (not plastic ones though: autoclaved plastic = sticky mess.)
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Rank: Guest
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Posted By Ian Stone
For information I work at a College and from time to time the staff find discarded needles, at present they use litter pickers to pick them up and put into sharp boxes. This can cause the needle to flick out of the pickers so I have been advised that tongs are safer as you have more control.
Thanks
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Rank: Guest
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Posted By Diane Thomason
Yup, I agree with that.
Diane
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Posted By Ian Mycroft
We have had needles stuck in some very difficult to access places e.g. air vents, behind toilet cisterns, inside toilet roll dispesers, etc. We try, wherever possible to make it difficult to do this, but the people that do this sort of thing seem to be very inventive and resourceful. To overcome this we have found that the grabbers used by mechanics to retrieve items that have dropped inside engines and engine compartments are ideal and grip the needles very firmly.
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