Medical Instrument Cleaning Brushes

For as long as surgical instruments have been used, surgeons have always turned to cleaning brushes for the cleansing process. Once a while reading a book about American-Made medical instruments, I noticed that a Civil War amputation set had its own cleaning brush in the kit. No longer do we use industrial brushes, toothbrushes or even surgeon's hand scrub brushes to do our cleaning. But now-a-days we have all differnt medical instrument brushes for different cleaning purposes. For cleaning even the tinest hand held medical instruments in addition to suction tubes like laparoscopic instruments, forceps and flexible endoscopes.

Over the decades the medical instrument manufacturing process has came along way. Many brushes are known as wire twisted. This means they have to twist the two pieces of wire in together to keep the nylon bristles in order. In years past, this wire was often made of galvanized steel, which rusted easily and limited the life of the brush. This is why today the vast majority of cleaning brushes are created by surgical stainless steel wire and medical grade nylon. Brush technology has advance in recent years by using a new procedure which extends its life. They use medical-grade nylon and stainless steel wire.

As mentioned previously, there are brushes for cleaning almost surgical instrument and it is important to use the appropriate brush. For example, if the diameter your using for your brush is to large, the brush does not effectively clean. If the bristle diameter is too small, the brush will not touch the sides of the lumen and will not clean.

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