Investigating the failure of repeated standard cleaning and disinfection of a Pseudomonas aeruginosa–infected pancreatic and biliary endoscope

Digestive endoscopy is an important technique for the diagnosis and treatment of digestive system disease. To assure medical safety, a digestive endoscope must be cleaned and disinfected before its use in an operation on the next patient. The most common treatment procedure on a digestive endoscope is high-level disinfection. The potential risk associated with digestive endoscopes is always the focus of endoscopic management in clinical practice. In this study, a polluted pancreatic and biliary endoscope after surgery was cleaned and disinfected multiple times with the standard procedure but still tested positive for Pseudomonas aeruginosa culture, which is very rare and has not been reported in China or abroad. Copyright (C) 2015 by the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license