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T
he St. Cloud (Minn.) Surgical Center has a matching set of germ-
zapping robots, a girl and a boy. There's "Dora," which stands for
Disinfecting Operating Room Apparatus. And "Gus," short for
Give Us Sterility. The $100,000 robots, which generate intense
pulsed UV light that's said to be 25,000 times brighter than sun-
light, get quite a workout in the surgery center.
They're used primarily to decontaminate the surfaces in the 11 ORs, for daily
terminal cleaning, after dirty cases — a hernia repair that follows a
colonoscopy, for example — and after any procedure involving a patient
known to have an infection. One of St. Cloud's surgeons insists that a robot zap
Let UV Light Shine
Small but mighty superbug-zapping robots that
decontaminate the surfaces you missed are the newest
craze in infection prevention. Dan O'Connor | Editor-in-Chief
z BUST THE BUGS It's more like zap the bugs when
you set a UV-C-emitting device loose in your OR.
Pamela
Bevelhymer,
RN,
BSN
