ABSTRACT
It may seem surprising, but cleaning and sterilization are areas on which there are few nationally agreed guidelines: almost all procedures are derived from locally agreed best practice discussions. Single -use tubes and breathing system components have made some of the problems related to sterility and cross-infection much easier to deal with, but their sensible everyday use is based on what seems to be reasonable opinion rather than experimental fact. Although evidence has been published suggesting that cross-infection can occur from contaminated anaesthesia equipment (see Dorsch and Dorsch, Further reading), well-authenticated cases are extremely rare given the number of anaesthetics administered. One useful way of looking at things is to follow the classification of the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They categorized items into three categories based on the potential risk of infection involved in their use: critical items, semicritical items, and non-critical items.
