Spore Testing
So what's a spore test and why is it important? First it's important to understand what a spore is. When you first think of spores you may have visions of mushroom zombies running amuck chewing on people, or not. Though it is true that many shrooms produce spores in order to reproduce, we are going to be focussing on the construction of a spore a bit more than the various types that are out there.
So basically a spore is described as a protective casing around a bacteria or virus which protects it and allows it to live outside of it's normal environment until a host can be found. Fortunately HIV doesn't have one of these, but Hepatitis does. Just like everything else in nature there are different strengths, or thicknesses, of spores out there. Spore tests are done to ensure that your sterilizer is breaking through the spores and killing the inhabitants within them.
So how does a spore test work then? Well in any proper scientific procedure there is a test group and a control group. A lab sends you both; one sealed, one available to sterilize. Hepatitis B has one of the stronger casings out in the world. So since they are not going to be shipping HepB around the country they have found a spore with a very similar construction in order ensure that the sterilizer is capable of breaking the spore down enough to kill what's inside.
The test strip is placed into the middle of a load of items being sterilized. Once it is run through a sterilization cycle it is placed in the envelope to send back to the lab. Once the lab gets the samples they remove both of them and attempt to grow cultures. The hope here is that the control group grows and the test group doesn't. The reason for that is to ensure that the control group was a viable sample to begin with. Once the incubation period is finished the lab sends the results to the client. Generally speaking, most labs will emergency contact the client if there is growth on the test sample to that they can pull any items from those batches from supply and repair or replace their sterilizer.
So that's how spore tests work and why we do them, I hope that you enjoyed this and have gained a better understanding.
-Ray
Health Hepatitis HIV Staph StrepA CrossC Spore
_ 
_