The Optometrist
Idor De Simone optician optometrist at Maugeri Scientific - Clinical Institutes Contactologist www.facebook.com/idordesimone/
The importance of hygiene of eyeglass frames, not only at the time of Covid-19 Cleaning and hygiene are now even more fundamental. It is essential to keep eyeglass frames (of all kinds, even those intended for professional use) sanitized and sterilized to avoid contamination by bacteria, viruses and other pathogenic microorganisms. Sterilization is the final result of a process that seeks to assure the condition in which the survival of microorganisms is highly improbable. A material is defined as sterile if the sterility assurance level is less than 10-6, so when the probability of finding a microorganism is less than one in a million. The various processes of sterilization destroy microorganisms causing the lethal alteration of some of their essential components: they shall, in particular, determine denaturing proteins and nucleid acids and the degradation of membrane and cell walls components. According to the norms, it is necessary to sterilize all the items belonging in Category II (semicritical items including eyeglass frames) which come into contact with intact mucous membranes, whose requirement is the desirable sterility; a high level disinfection with a good level of safe-
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ty guarantees that the article is free of pathogenic microorganisms in most cases. Before sterilization a series of preventive procedures must be followed to reduce the microbial load and make the sterilizing action more effective and they can be summed up by five points: 1. Decontamination 2. Cleansing 3. Rinsing 4. Drying 5. Packing Sterilization can be carried out by: PHYSICAL PROCESSES • Dry heat: sterilization occurs through the contact of the object with hot air, which acts by oxidation of the cellular components. Dry oven or Pasteur oven are used, which require a temperature of 160 degrees for an hour or 180 degrees for 30 minutes to be reached. However, it is a disused and replaced by steam sterilization technique because it is slow and and it’s impossible to verify that the sterilization has taken place and the maintenance over time of the achieved result. • Moist heat: it is a technique that exploits the action of flowing steam (Koch’s steam sterilizer)
