Reasons to Change to Microfiber Cloths

When it comes to the prevention of the spread of diseases the custodians are the first line and last line of defense. With 80 percent of infections being caused through direct contact there won’t be anything stopping these bacteria if the custodians aren’t equipped with the right tools. This doesn’t mean having to buy thousands of dollars worth of heavy duty equipment for your facility, but instead just to make sure not to cut corners on the cheaper things that you need to clean and disinfect your facility.

So do you want to be in a facility were the bacteria and soil is being spread around by cotton cloths or to ensure that the soil and bacteria is getting picked up through the use of Microfiber Cloths?

When cleaning with traditional cotton rags in most situations you will be picking up a good majority of bacteria, but this is only half the battle when it comes to cleaning and disinfecting. The true challenge is not to just remove the bacteria from a surface, but the soils from the surface as well to give the disinfecting chemicals a fighting chance according to Darrel Hicks, author of Infection Prevention for Dummies. Cotton rags while cheap and readily available, are not particularly good at picking up these soils off of surfaces which is one of the problems of using cotton rags.

Microfiber cloths on the other hand work by gently scrapping against the surface to help pull the soil and bacteria off of the surface. They then use their engineered pockets within their fabric to collect and trap the soil until the cloths are washed to prevent from spreading it across the surface. Making them extremely effective in preparing a surface to be disinfected.

Another problem that cotton cloths have is when you are using quat-based disinfectants. The cloths can have a strong attraction with the active ingredients in these quat disinfectants, which causes the cloths to spread the soil and bacteria rather than picking it up off the surface.

At The University of Minnesota Medical Center they tested the efficiency of both cloth and microfiber cloths, which led their decision to switch to microfiber.

The University found that Microfiber cloths will pick up spores and microorganisms even if you don’t use disinfectants were as cotton will just spread them across the surface. As well according to Amanda Guspiel, environmental infection preventionist since using these microfiber cloths they have not had any issues with quat binding that can occur with cotton rags.

Through changing to microfiber Guspiel has had a decrease in the number of Hospital acquired infections.

Cleanlink.com