Room, Suite Scale, Class III Biological Safety Cabinet, and Sensitive Equipment Decontamination and Validation Using Gaseous Chlorine Dioxide

摘要

The Tufts New England Regional Biosafety Laboratory facility has been using chlorine dioxide gas for >5 years, and > 100 decontaminations have been done at the room level and on a Class III cabinet. The rooms have ranged from animal holding rooms containing animal racks (housing rodents and rabbits), biosafety cabinets, and computers to biosafety level 3 laboratories containing a variety of equipment (microscopes, biosafety cabinets, centrifuges, incubators, real-time polymerase chain reaction machines, etc). For a biosafety level 3 facility, the equipment is stainless steel where possible, but there is a variety of materials, including electronics and other sensitive equipment. No corrosion has been experienced on any equipment or surface despite repeated decontaminations. Even the most sensitive equipment has not experienced any ill effects. As a test, when decontaminations were started, a low-cost laptop computer was moved from room to room to a Class III cabinet, decontaminating it every time in each chamber. After 35 repeated exposures, it was still functioning with no issues. It is still in use in one of the animal rooms and gets decontaminated along with the room. The Class III cabinet has not shown any traces of corrosion on the stainless-steel interior, nor has the stainless-steel inhalation exposure system kept inside the cabinet experienced any ill effects.