The role of AHPCO Technology in reducing allergic rhinitis cases as Air Purifier, Surface Sterilizer and Ice Maker sterilizer

The ice served in six out of ten of Britain’s most popular high street restaurants contains more bacteria than the toilet water, in a recent investigation “The Daily Mail” has found. Scientific tests revealed that ice from many restaurants had higher levels of bacteria than samples of water taken from their lavatory bowls(3). Dirty ice machine causing contamination via ice cubes is also a major health problem in other countries including the United States (4). To prevent any potential contamination, the interior surfaces of the ice machine must be cleaned and sanitized regularly. This report justifies the demand and use of novel equipment that will sanitize the surface of an ice machine continuously. We evaluated the Bi-Polar® unit built by Air Oasis in sanitizing the ice machine surface. The Bi-Polar® creates cold plasma discharge which consists of positive and negative ions from water vapor in the air. Positive and negative ions attach to particles and allergens such as dust, smoke, pollen and dander. Particles cluster together to create larger particles and those larger heavy particles drop out of the air and are easily trapped in filters. We prepared petri-plates using Brain Heart Infusion Agar (Difco) to assess the capability of the Bi-Polar® unit in reducing contamination in the ice makers. Two sets of petri-plates were inoculated with sterile cotton swab with the inoculum collected from the ice-maker surface at the time intervals of 24, 48, 72, 120 and 168 hours. The colonies representing microbial growth were observed after 24 hours of incubation at 37o Celsius. The bacterial colonies were differentiated from the fungal ones based on their texture and surface features using a SZ-40 stereo-scope attached to goose neck fiber optics light source. We prepared slides from bacterial colonies stained with Gram staining and fungi with Lacto-Phenol Cotton Blue stain. The slides were observed and micrographed at 100X with a Leica DM-750 microscope (1A-F). We compared the two sets of petri-plates and slides prepared from with running and without running the Bi-Polar® unit. After running the Bi-Polar® 168 hours or more, there was a significant reduction in microbial entities including bacteria, fungi, slime molds and Cyanobacteria that has left blue green patches on the ice maker’s wall. Our investigation demonstrated the possibilities of contamination with a number of pathogens from a not so cleaned ice maker and that can be reduced significantly by using a Bi-Polar® unit.