My name is Kristen, I'm a respiratory therapist. I have a brother and sister with cf. I lurk around here more than I comment. I really love patient education with my job and I'm really big on making sure nebs are properly cleaned. It's so hard to know what to do because there are many ways to clean a nebulizer, but only a few actually disinfect. One article posted below actually lists all the different ways RTs and nurses have told their patients how to clean the nebulizers, and not all of them are foundation approved.
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<br />I will post several links to great evidence based articles that I found when I was trying to help my mom figure out how to clean the nebs.
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<br />this article is just about infection control (you have to click on full text to read it):
<br /><a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="http://cmr.asm.org/cgi/content/abstract/17/1/57
">http://cmr.asm.org/cgi/content/abstract/17/1/57
</a><br />
<br />this article is about nebs and infection control (this article is older; but its still good):
<br /><a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="http://www.rcjournal.com/contents/12.04/12.04.1504.pdf
">http://www.rcjournal.com/contents/12.04/12.04.1504.pdf
</a><br />
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<br />this is where I got all my info on boiling and disinfecting:
<br /><a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="http://www.reproline.jhu.edu/english/4morerh/4ip/IP_manual/12_HLD.pdf
">http://www.reproline.jhu.edu/e.../IP_manual/12_HLD.pdf
</a><br />
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<br />this article talks about infection control and several ways of disinfecting a nebulizer (from the cff.org web site)
<br /><a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="http://www.cff.org/UploadedFiles/LivingWithCF/StayingHealthy/Germs/StoppingTheSpread/StoppingSpreadGerms.pdf
">http://www.cff.org/UploadedFil...oppingSpreadGerms.pdf
</a><br />
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<br />I hope this helps..it might take awhile to go through..but I wanted to give everyone some great medical articles to review.
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