Hygiena Q-Swab Environmental Sampling Swab

A surface swab has one job: pick up whatever is on a surface and deliver it to the laboratory unchanged. Both halves of that are harder than they look, and both are where a sampling programme quietly goes wrong.

Why pre-moistened

A dry swab picks up very little. Bacteria adhere to a surface and stay there unless the swab is wet enough to lift them, so a swab wetted at the point of use — from a bottle someone filled that morning — collects an unknown fraction of what is there. A swab that arrives already charged with a measured volume of the correct broth collects the same fraction every time, which is what makes results comparable week to week.

Choosing the broth

Buffered peptone water is the general-purpose recovery medium. It keeps stressed organisms alive on the way to the laboratory without favouring any of them, and it is what most enumeration methods expect.

Letheen broth neutralises disinfectant residue. That matters when the swab is taken after cleaning, which is usually the whole point: without a neutraliser, the sanitiser still on the surface keeps working inside the tube and kills the very organisms the sample was meant to find. A clean result from a non-neutralising swab taken after sanitising proves nothing.

Using it

The device is validated for a 10 x 10 cm area. Swab that area in overlapping strokes in two directions, rotating the swab as you go, then return it to its tube and seal it. Record the location; a positive result nobody can trace to a surface is a result nobody can act on.

Supplied 250 per case.