Every year, the healthcare cleaning market fills with new products making bold claims about their ability to kill pathogens, disrupt biofilms and protect surfaces between cleans. Some of those claims are well-founded. Many, according to leading researchers, are not, and the consequences of misplaced confidence extend well beyond wasted procurement budgets.
At a recent ISSA Oceania webinar, Dr Rodney Rohde, chair and regent professor at Texas State University, Professor Greg Whiteley, executive chairman of Whiteley Corporation, and Linda Lybert, president of the Healthcare Services Institute, addressed the question of product claims head-on. The message was consistent from all three panellists, that scrutiny of the evidence behind a product is not optional, it’s a professional obligation.
The problem with 99.9 percent
Walking into a hospital and observing an environmental services worker deliberately skip cleaning a surface is not something Linda Lybert expected to see. When she asked the worker why, the answer stopped her cold. “It’s antimicrobial,” the worker said. “It’s cleaning itself.”
Lybert was direct in her response. “I have news for you. Microbes will still attach, and they do form biofilm, and they actually have developed resistance to that antimicrobial product.” The incident captures a broader operational failure that product marketing has helped to create, that is, a false sense of security that active cleaning is no longer required.
Rohde pointed to the near-universal ‘99.9 percent’ claim that appears on the label of almost every disinfectant product, encouraging cleaning professionals to look beyond the headline figure. “You really want to ask questions about that, and make sure it’s truly what the product is capable of doing,” he said, noting that test conditions used to generate such figures frequently bear little resemblance to the complex, biofilm-laden environments found in real healthcare facilities.
White papers are not peer review
Whiteley raised a concern that goes directly to how product evidence is generated and presented. “Too many people produce white papers without going through peer review,” he said. “I’ll get them signed off by a couple of experts, and it looks really impressive until you really get into the science and say, hang on a minute, the evidence isn’t there.”
The probiotic cleaner category drew particular scrutiny. Whiteley acknowledged that probiotics have legitimate and well-evidenced applications in enteric contexts, skin cleansers and animal health, but drew a firm distinction between those settings and the healthcare cleaning environment. “When it comes to using them in a healthcare setting to try and take out MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), it’s a different world of pain, and the level of evidence we need is totally different. None of the evidence currently exists.”
The wider issue, Whiteley argued, is that the complexity of biofilm science makes it relatively straightforward to impress buyers with technical language without the rigour to back it up. “It’s easy to dazzle with what looks like spectacular science, but ultimately the bugs are smarter than that.”
Context is everything
Beyond the question of fraudulent or exaggerated claims, even genuinely effective products carry significant contextual limitations for which purchasing decisions must account. Rohde was emphatic on this point. “One product may work here, but it may not work there, just like certain antibiotics may work here and not there. So you really have to be informed.”
Whiteley reinforced this with data on disinfectant concentration. One milligram per litre of available chlorine is sufficient to eliminate planktonic bacteria in a swimming pool, yet research has shown that Staphylococcus aureus in a dry surface biofilm can resist concentrations of 20,000 parts per million. “Strength is not necessarily the answer,” Whiteley added. The right product, applied correctly, at the right dwell time, on a surface that has been properly cleaned first, is a very different proposition to simply selecting the highest concentration available.
For cleaning professionals navigating procurement decisions, the panel’s collective advice comes down to one principle: demand peer-reviewed evidence, interrogate the test conditions behind any claim, and treat any product positioned as a stand-alone solution with appropriate scepticism.
