Environmental Services

Researchers at the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences have devised a bedbug trap that can be built with household items. All you need are two disposable plastic containers, masking tape and glue, says Phil Koehler, UF/IFAS urban entomology professor. The traps catch and collect the bugs when they try to travel between people and the places where bedbugs hide, he adds.

Experts are pushing for a surgical conscience in the operating room that also encompasses a heightened awareness of intraoperative transmission of potentially pathogenic organisms and a comprehensive environmental hygiene program in which both processes and outcomes issues related to the role of the operating room environment in pathogen transmission are monitored and measured. While the role of the environment continues to be an imperative, renewed focus is being placed on the operating theater's obligation to control and prevention infections.

Cleaning often involves chlorine bleach, which has been used as a disinfectant for hundreds of years. But our bodies have been using bleach’s active component, hypochlorous acid, to help clean house for millennia. As part of our natural response to infection, certain types of immune cells produce hypochlorous acid to help kill invading microbes, including bacteria.