Is this when you sterilize the agar in flasks? If not, I'm very unclear
how you're using these.
What is a Kluyver flask? This is obviously something not used in
clinical micro anywhere that I've worked. Do you work in another area of
micro, i.e. environmental, etc.?
Hospitals I've worked for the last twenty years we use mostly commercial
plated media, although we were autoclaving our own MacConkey and Sabs
for awhile in the late 80's/early 90's. We used gauze and autoclave tape
and got away from cotton wool eons ago (pre early 70's). Hospitals buy
premade stuff here as no one seems to want to pay lab aids to make media
or wash test tubes out. Besides, we have to support the big commercial
health industry media companies :-). In the 70's and early 80's we used
to have two "kitchen" ladies that would wash out all those tubes so we
could reuse them, as we did make some tubed media. The hospital
brilliantly laid them off in the post-DRG cost cuttings after 1984.
These were the ladies in the lab that could least afford to lose their
jobs, of course. They were never replaced.
I know there are some places that still make a lot of media but not in
any of the labs in our area.
Judy Dilworth, M.T. (ASCP)
Microbiology
Lesley Robertson wrote:
> >
> We still use cotton plugs in conical flasks for culturing aerobes, and in
> Kluyver flasks for most things.
