Laboratory Air Monitoring
Hello everyone, I am trying to find acceptable Yeast and mold limits for sedimentary monitoring of Microbiology laboratory air.
I use to be a Microbiologist at my old workplace and we did weekly environmental monitoring. We set out air settling plates and incubated them. Our lab limit was 5 colonies. No idea who determined that or why they chose 5, but that was our limit before we had to do an investigation. In the 4 years I was in the lab we never got more than 2, maybe 3 colonies, mostly got 0.
I appreciate it, it was fairly easy to find literature on APC limits but Y/M I haven't been able to find. Did yall make any different entries for blue/green molds (not that you would have any) vs brown molds. The thought being blue/green could be aspergillus.
Yeah we had a track and trend excel spreadsheet we'd fill in and we noted anything weird. If we were ever unsure on what the colony was we sent it out to Charles River for an analysis. I don't recall getting blue or green colonies though.
Hello everyone, I am trying to find acceptable Yeast and mold limits for sedimentary monitoring of Microbiology laboratory air.
Is there some reason why Y&M would be expected to be detected ? eg Contamination from ?
Good morning. Unless they are treating/filtering the outside air (for room ventilation) that they are bringing into the lab area via the heating/cooling/ventilation system, there will always be a risk of high Y&M, especially if they are in an area that has a lot of rain. I have personally experienced high levels of Y&M contamination inside a production room and the root cause was the external "untreated/unfiltered" air that we were bringing into the facility/production room. It wasn't until we started to receive complaints on our finished product that we realized we had a problem. Once we started to monitor for Y&M via air plating, the counts in the room were in the 10's of thousands! We ended up investing in the appropriate HEPA systems, etc... and were able to get the counts down by atomizing with Quat Ammonia at the end of each sanitation shift using wall mount units (similar to Glade air fresheners).