Current state of the art for dental cleaning: manual cleaning with an assist from an ultrasonic cleaner.

When you want to evaluate a cleaning process, you’d like to do it under controlled conditions.  That is, you’d like to test different processes and apparatus on identical dirt.  For surgical applications, there are sets of representative “test soils” that can be placed on instruments and run through different cleaning procedures.  Such standards don’t yet exist for dental applications, but people are trying.  How close are they?  That’s what researchers at the Medical University of Vienna wanted to know.  Their conclusion at the moment is that there is no representative dental test soil, and the most effective cleaning regimen for typical dental procedures is manual or ultrasonic cleaning.

For further information visit www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

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