Lab bench disinfectants

[Mike O'Hara]

Bernie MacLennan wrote:
> 
> What are most people using for routine disinfection practices in
> undergraduate microbiology  labs.
> 
> Bernie MacLennan

Bernie

A lot of people use alcohol (often 70% v/v) but is not much chop against
any of the hardier microorganisms and won't even look at spore formers. 

For virus disinfection  a product called Virkon works well and they
provide a fair bit of validation data with it. For general and bacterial
including spores there is a product called Bacti-Pal. It is very
aggressive (nitric acid is one of its components) but we validated it to
bump off spores so it certainly does the job.

Mike