June 12, 2014 — A recent peer-reviewed article published earlier this year in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) by Steve Brozak and Anne Marie Noronha again establishes a case for an alternative to the conventional endoscope cleaning process and reviews why conventional cleaning puts patients at risk of infection. The publication, "A 21st century nosocomial issue with endoscopes," also identifies the sterile, disposable EndoSheath technology from Vision-Sciences as a safe, cost-effective alternative to conventional flexible endoscopes.
Key points stated in the BMJ article include:
- Reprocessing conventional flexible endoscopes is "time-consuming, labor-intensive, expensive and, most importantly, susceptible to failure."
- Due to "limited surveillance, limited reporting, and lack of immediate clinical symptoms of patients," experts agree that cross-contamination is significantly under-reported.
- Infections "resulting from scope contamination breaks the trust between patients and doctors and places a financial burden on healthcare institutions."
- Research shows that using EndoSheath technology and its simplified cleaning and disinfection procedure offers "a vast improvement over current decontamination procedures."
- EndoSheath technology eliminates "unreliable and cumbersome reprocessing" of conventional endoscopes by condensing the protocol into just a few steps, and "reduces reprocessing time by up to 31 minutes."
- Due to its design, the technology is "more cost effective, reduces repair costs, and decreases investment in multiple scopes that are out of operation while being cleaned."
The flexible EndoSheath technology is patented and cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
For more information: http://www.wbbsec.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/BMJ-endoscope-infectio…
July 25, 2024 
