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Researchers from the Netherlands are trying a new method to sterilise surgical equipment – by using plasma. Medical devices can be sterilised by sealing them inside plastic bags and then employing electromagnetic fields to generate plasmas - partly ionised gasses containing free electrons and reactive ions.
Norbert Koster and his team at TNO Science and Industry, an independent research organisation in the Netherlands, are involved in the research.
Scientists have known that plasmas have the capability to kill bacteria and sterilise objects, but the major problem has always been that plasma-sterilised objects still had to be packed into a sealed container afterwards. There was no way to sterilise them inside sealed containers.
Now Koster and his team have found a way to sterilise medical tools by sealing them inside vacuum bags and then placing them in chambers that are at even lower pressure.
This causes the vacuum pack around the tools to puff out. Then they use an electromagnetic field to remotely ignite a plasma inside the bag, killing the bacteria and viruses therein.
When the process is finished and the bag is removed from the chamber, the outside pressure causes it to shrink down again to closely wrap the now sterilised objects, keeping them sealed.
At the moment, Koster and his team are investigating how long the discharge needs to be to destroy all the bacteria and viruses, says a release of the American Institute of Physics.
This method is not likely to replace the traditional autoclave any time soon, but it opens up the possibility of sterilising new types of instruments, including detectors and other fancy electronics that would otherwise be damaged.
