PRIORITY business intelligence

Ensuring that health products are sterile can be crucial to the safety of patients. The new standard ISO 20857:2010, Sterilization of health care products - Dry heat - Requirements for the development, validation and routine control of a sterilization process for medical devices, will help manufacturers, laboratories, regulators and health care practitioners worldwide to promote good sterilization practices. The standard applies both to reuseable health care products that are reprocessed by health care providers and to single-use products that are sterilized as part of the manufacturing process and are shipped in a sterile state. It provides manufacturers and health care providers with clearly defined requirements for sterilization processes and related equipment will help decrease the probability that patients using health care products will be exposed to potentially pathogenic microorganisms.