Controlling Microbial Growth
Why bother with microbial control?
Your skin, the ground and pretty much every surface you come into contact with is teeming with microorganisms. While this isn't normally an issue as the immune system takes pretty good care of most encountered pathogens, there are situations where microbial load (the number of infection pathogens on an item) needs to be carefully managed.
In patient care scenarios, careful cleaning procedures are put in place to control the spread of infection. While this sounds very official, the processes start out very similarly to cleaning your kitchen surfaces or bathroom.
Where potentially contaminated items are invasively introduced to soft tissue of the vascular system sterilization techniques are used to prevent infection transmission. Otherwise, less stringent decontamination techniques can be used to keep living organisms safe from pathogenic harm.
Below are a few topics related to decontamination that are useful to explore: