Sunday 15 December 2013

Sterilize tattoo needle by boiling

In our real life there are lots of methods to sterilize tattoo needle ,such as chemical,bleach, autoclave and boiling water. For most people the convenient way to sterilize tattoo needle is using boiling water. But can we use the boiling water to sterilize tattoo needle ? The answer is as follows.

Boiling water is generally unable to fully sterilize jewelry, needles, or other body modification equipment. Boiling water is 100 degrees Celsius. Although this will theoretically kill most organisms other than endospores and some viruses in half an hour, because endospores are not killed and the consistency is poor, no health boards consider boiling as a viable form of sterilization. The CDC (center for disease control) has permitted boiling of needles and medical tools for an hour in extreme cases in areas where autoclaves and other more functional methods are not available. They emphasize the additional difficulty of controlling contamination from the containers for the boiled items, as well as the tools used to transfer them (since you can't boil something inside an autoclave bag ). After the item is boiled it is then transferred to a sterile field to dry, and then placed in a sterile container if possible. It should also be pointed out that while in theory boiling mostly works, in real-world tests at dental clinics still using boiling as their method of sterilization, staphylococcus bacteria were found on tools that had been boiled - and this is one of the most common bacteria linked to infections in new tattoos and body piercings. It must be emphasized that boiling as a sterilization procedure is not recommended and is utterly unacceptable in a professional context. For self-piercing or tattooing: This might be an acceptable way to clean equipment and jewelry that have been used on either no one or only on you, but this is definitely not an acceptable way to clean tools that have come in contact with anyone else. You can take this a notch up by using a pressure cooker (since one could argue that a steam autoclave is essentially just a fancy pressure cooker). However, realize that because a pressure cooker doesn't have the gauges and monitoring ability that an autoclave does, you'll never really know how effective your sterilization cycle was. It’s just not worth the risks.

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