Application of a Quantitative Carrier Test to Evaluate Microbicides against Mycobacteria
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Microbicides for reprocessing heat-sensitive medical devices, such as flexible endoscopes, must be mycobactericidal to reduce the risk of nosocomial infections. Suspension test methods currently used for efficacy evaluation lack the stringency required for assessing inactivation of mycobacteria on surfaces. The quantitative carrier test method reported here is based on mycobacteria-contaminated reference carrier disks of brushed stainless steel. Each disk was contaminated with 10 microL of a suspension of Mycobacterium terrae containing a soil load. Each disk with a dried inoculum was placed in a glass or Teflon vial, and then overlaid with 50 microL of the test formulation or 50 microL saline for the control carriers. Five test and 3 control disks were used in each run. At the end of the contact time, each vial received 9.95 mL neutralizer solution with 0.1% Tween-80 to stop the reaction and perform the initial microbicide dilution. The inoculum was eluted by mixing on a Vortex mixer for 60 s, and the eluates and saline used to subsequently wash the vials and the funnels were membrane-filtered. Filters were placed on plates of Middlebrook 7H11 agar and incubated at 37 degrees C for at least 30 days before colonies were counted and log10 reductions were calculated in colony-forming units. Tests with a range of commercially available products, having claims against mycobacteria, or believed to be broad-spectrum microbicides, showed that the method gave reproducible results. Products used included oxidizing agents (sodium hypochlorite and an iodophore), a phenolic, a quaternary ammonium compound, and ortho-phthalaldehyde. This method represents a much more realistic evaluation than the currently used quantitative suspension test method for the evaluation of mycobactericidal formulations for registration and, when performed at different product concentrations, allows an assessment of any safety margin or risks in using the test formulation in the field.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".