In the 1960’s, a NICU unit ran out of their standard issue hand soap. Nurses and staff brought their own soaps from home. Bad move. One of the soaps was contaminated. The nurses used it right before handling the newborns. You can guess what happened next. I’m guessing too, because I can’t find the source of this story anymore. Maybe this is it, but that story’s about hand lotion, and it’s not even a neonatal unit. This one is a neonatal unit, but much more recent than I remembered. And the soap came from a re-fillable dispenser (it wasn’t manufacturing contamination). Those dispensers have their own issues, but not nearly frequent enough to outweigh washing your hands. Why write about soap? I used to be a Senior Microbiologist / Plant Hygienist at a soap company. No, I wasn’t the cool research scientist discovering new ways to kill bacteria. I was there to make sure bacteria weren’t in the soap we made. I want to write about a contamination event that happened at this soap company. I was hired to address this contamination. When I started, I introduced myself to everyone with a little presentation. I gave my background and went over the importance of making clean soap. Coming from a sterile injectables background, I didn’t know where to start with that second part. So, I looked to some Friends: Once I hooked ‘em with laughter, I wanted to hit ‘em with the impact of real-life soap-contamination. That’s when I whipped out the sick babies. I swear I had a source back then! It had pictures I used in that presentation. Unfortunately, now the internet only wants to tell me about Covid anytime I search for “infection”, “soap” or “hand washing”.
But the impact of contamination is rarely the microbes involved. Before I started at the soap company, they justified releasing their products because the counts were low and the product wasn’t intended to be sterile. That decision changed when we eventually found the root cause. I learned a good lesson from this investigation. I took it with me when I went back into pharma, where microbes are usually only seen in early processing steps. They get filtered out before the product is filled. But what else sticks around in the product? In both those scenarios, management looked at the contamination as if the bacteria floated in as pure individual cells. I learned that’s rarely the case. This post is part 1 of a 3-part series. In the next couple parts, I’m going to dig into the soap and the pharma issues where the bacterial contamination was just a symptom of the real problem. Stick around if you want to hear what’s getting into your soap AND your drugs! Part 2 is right here!
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