Your decon questions answered

Starting with a question that gets asked quite often, why shouldn’t household cleaning products be used in the practice?

We get asked this question a lot, and there are a number of reasons why household products shouldn’t be used to clean dental practices.

Firstly, the efficacy of household products cannot be guaranteed, mainly because of how they are regulated. HTM 01-05 states that anything deemed a medical device, or that comes into contact with a medical device, must be CE marked. CE marking is a regulatory standard that ensures that products work in the way they are designed and labelled. During covid, a well-known household brand had to withdraw their surface spray labelling because the label stated it, ‘kills coronaviruses’. It became clear during the pandemic that the product hadn't been tested against coronaviruses, hence the withdrawal.