Advice for ensuring your equipment is sterile to reduce the spread of COVID-19
With many parts of the world gearing up to lift certain working restrictions enforced to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic, here is some guidance from our experts for keeping your Scientifica manufactured microscopes, micromanipulators and other equipment sterile when you return to the lab. We are releasing this guidance to help prevent the spread of COVID-19, and to maintain the condition and performance of your equipment for the long-term.
Links to guidance
Although we are providing advice to keep your equipment sterile to help prevent infection from COVID-19 and other infectious agents, we cannot guarantee that your microscope and other components will be free of infectious agents. It is therefore recommended that all users follow the applicable institutional and national guidelines. We have provided links to some national and worldwide guidelines below:
Handling equipment
We recommend that you follow the institutional and national guidance, as well as the guidance issued by organisations such as the World Health Organisation (WHO).
It is important to wear Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), including gloves, protective gowns and lab goggles when handling microscope components. Draping a clean glove over parts that are regularly handled, such as levers, is also recommended. Where possible, we recommend using a PatchPad for focusing your microscope and camera for viewing, instead of eye pieces.
Sterilising equipment
We recommend disinfecting before and after each use of the equipment, wearing a fresh set of gloves each time.
We advise using 70% ethanol to disinfect Scientifica products that are not optical components, including the body of the microscope, stage, accessories and micromanipulators. Apply this to all components that come into direct contact with users with a damp, non-abrasive cloth, such as low-lint lab tissue. Ensure that there is no dripping or pooling of the ethanol, to avoid it infiltrating into the electronic components.
We discourage the use of any disinfectant that does not evaporate quickly or that contains surfactants, as those are a risk to the health of live samples.
Please follow the instructions in this guide for cleaning the optical components of your microscope, including objective lenses, eyepiece lenses, filters, condensers and slides.
The above recommendations are for Scientifica manufactured equipment only. If you would like further advice and guidance, please contact us.
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