When the one thing you need to be sterile all of a sudden isn't, that's a really big problem.
There's been a recall of over 170 million medical disinfectant pads, as reported by Yahoo! News. The pads are used to disinfect the skin before medical procedures. They're made of 70% isopropyl alcohol, so they normally can kill any contaminants.
But, the FDA has reported that a batch of 170 million disinfectant pads have possibly been contaminated with Paenibacillus phoenicis. While this bacteria normally wouldn't pose much of a threat to a healthy person, it could harm patients that are vulnerable to infection.
The contaminated pads were distributed nationwide in the US, as well as in Puerto Rico and Japan. The specific name of the possibly contaminated disinfectant pads are "Webcol Alcohol Prep pad". Cardinal Health 200 in Waukegan, Illinois started the recall order after finding out about the issue.
The FDA hasn't put out a class ranking on how severe this recall is set to be. They have a pretty strict set of recall classes. While a Class I recall says that an affected product could cause death, a Class III recall says an affected product won't do much harm.
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This Comes After Chocolate Was Recently Recalled
There seems to be quite a lot of recalls lately, doesn't there?
As we recently reported, there has been a recall of Lidl's Favorina Chocolate Ladybugs. This comes after hazelnuts were found in the product.
This is especially worrying, as people with hazelnut allergies often can suffer severe consequences when exposed to them. When there's not a proper warning, that's a serious health concern.
Luckily, no one's become ill following the incident. And it's lucky they found that the products were contaminated. It would have only been a matter of time before something bad happened.
With this rise in contaminated products, we do have to wonder when things are going to slow down. Here's hoping that this isn't going to become a common thing. We're just honestly glad these things were caught before any big harm was done.
