[Histonet] Re: cryostat decontamination

[Robert Richmond]

Jeff Silverman notes that >>CAP is moving to more rigorous cryostat
decontamination methods - mandating a weekly shutdown and wet chemical
disinfection with a tuberculocidal agent for machines used
regularly.<< Cryostats will have to be brought up to room temperature
for this procedure.

This weekly decontamination routine would take an extraordinary amount
of time. In many labs the pathologist would probably be called on to
do it, and would probably refuse. I think that a lot of labs will drop
CAP accreditation over this issue, unless JCAHO mandates the same
routine.

I don't know what I would consider an appropriate routine here. It's
been a good many years since I cut a frozen section and found
granulomatous inflammation suspicious for tuberculosis. (Though I had
a paraffin-section case like that last week - don't have the special
stain reports yet.)

I clearly remember - when I was a resident in one of America's most
tuberculous cities forty years ago - a right colon resection for what
turned out on frozen section to be not cancer, but tuberculosis
involving the lymph nodes around the cecum. I promptly downed the
cryostat (no problem, since we had four of them) and had it up to room
temperature and was wiping away when the chief (Bill Shelley, of blest
memory) came by and observed "Boy, do you still believe in the germ
theory of disease?"

Bob Richmond
Samurai Pathologist
Knoxville TN