Can household dishwashers be used to disinfect medical equipment?

In hospitals, medical instruments are usually cleaned and disinfected in a washer/disinfector. However, it is not efficient for small hospitals or gen eral practitioners to purchase such machines as they would not be working t o capacity. We investigated the possibility of cleaning and disinfecting me dical equipment in a conventional household dishwasher modified to achieve a temperature of 71 degrees C. For this purpose we contaminated screws with different test soils containing either bacterial (100 screws) or viral (10 6 screws) suspensions. Test organisms were re-isolated from 2% of the screw s after bacterial contamination and 4.7% of those with viral contamination. In both cases we found dishwasher-processing to be a suitable means of dis infecting medical instruments. (C) 2000 The Hospital Infection Society.