HEALTH AND MEDICINE

At right, dentist Dr. M. Keith Cox, president of Cox Sterile Products, Inc., Dallas, Texas, displays the Cox Rapid Heat Transfer Sterilizer TM he developed with the help of NASA technology. Intended for fast, effective, economical sterilization of dental and medical instruments, the system employs dry heat technology that NASA used to sterilize an_d decontaminate two Viking Lander spacecraft that sought evidence of living organisms on Mars in the 1970s. The sterilizer's big advantage, according to Dr. Cox, is reduced sterilization timemas little as six minutes, far less time than steam autoclave and chemical vapor sterilizers need and about one-tenth the time required by a conventional dry heat oven. Rapid sterilization eliminates excessive heating, the prime cause of instrument damage, and allows sterilization between patients. That makes possible a reduction of more than 80 percent in instrument inventory, says Dr. Cox, which can mean savings of thousands of dollars. Dr. Cox became interested in sterilization when he worked his way through dental college as a scrub nurse in a hospital operating room. That experience, coupled with the dentistry profession's emphasis on infection control, prompted him to consider development of an improved instrument sterilization system for the dental office. Much of the information he needed was available in a NASA publication. In planning the Viking Mars missions, NASA had gone to extraordinary lengths in studying ways to sterilize the Viking Landers and thus protect the Mars environment from contamination by Earth organisms or particulate matter that might erroneously influence the Lander's analytical instruments. NASA explored and evaluated every form of thermal and chemical sterilization before settling on the dry heat approach, which offered minimal corrosion and obviated the use of toxic chemicals. This exhaustive research was summarized in a 1978 survey entitled Advances in Sterilization and Decontamination, prepared for Langley Research Center by The Bionetics Corporation,