News Archive

We are proud to announce that we could sign a partnership cooperation agreement with BioGenius. A leading chemical-physical analytics laboratory for biocidal and plant protection products. In addition, they are experts for efficacy testing of insecticides. Our partners: Partners

In our new market in the UAE we were able to sign a cooperation contract with one of the leading laboratories for chemical  and physical analysis PSN of food and environmental samples. Our partners: Partners

Dr. Brill + Partner GmbH Institute for Hygiene and Microbiology proudly announces that we received a research grant within the EU research fund Horizon 2020. The project is called "MicroArctic" and is focused and the microbiological characterization of the microbiological ecology of extreme habitats such as Greenland, Siberia etc. including the influence of global warming. We will employ after project start in 2016 a PhD student in cooperation with University of Potsdam for three years. The PhD student will focus on the characterization of pathogenic bacteria.

The Conference of Applied Hygiene, Microbiology and Virology from 8 – 9 October 2015 in Hamburg will be under the patronage of Senator Cornelia Prüfer-Storcks, Hamburg Authority for Health and Consumer Protection of the Senate of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg. We are very honored that the senator is presenting her personal interest in the topic and highlights its significance by her patronage.Furthermore, we are glad to announce Chemische Fabrik DR. WEIGERT GmbH & Co. KG being the first sponsor of the conference. During the workshop Reprocessing of Medical Devices according to ISO 17664, Dr. Matthias Toschoerner from DR. WEIGERT will present the topic View of Manufacturers of Cleaning, Disinfectant and Sterilization Products. Further program details as well as the registration form can be viewed under the following link: http://www.brillhygiene.com/en/akademie/termine/conference-applied-hygiene-microbiology-and-virology. It would be our pleasure to inform you about the possibilities and details of how to become a sponsor of the conference.

From June 16 – 19, 2015 the ICIPIC 2015 will be held in Geneva. During this conference the scientists of Dr. Brill + Partner GmbH Institute for Hygiene and Microbiology will contribute their valuable knowledge to the scientific conference program. The following topics will be presented in Geneva: Presentation – Florian H. H. Brill: Surface disinfection with wipe systems – Practical indications for a safe use. In line with the Satellite Symposia and Sponsored Sessions "Challenges and chances in the development and use of wipe systems for surface disinfection". More...Poster - Florian H. H. Brill, Nadine Radischat, Peter Goroncy-Bermes, Jörg Siebert: Residual Antiseptic Efficacy of Octenidine dihydrochloride versus Chlorhexidine gluconate in Alcoholic Solutions More...Poster - F. H. H. Brill, H. Braunwarth, D. Hegeholz, W. Droste: Determination of Bacteria Migration Speed through Urinary Catheter Systems in case of Urostomy More...Poster - R. A. Leslie, D. R. Macinga, F. H. H. Brill, M. Suchomel: Suitability of Enterococcus faecalis as a Test Organism to Evaluate In Vivo Efficacy of Alcohol-based Handrubs More...

Beim 11. Ulmer Symposium Krankenhausinfektionen vom 28. bis 30. April 2015, der größten deutschsprachigen Fachkonferenz im Bereich Infektionsprävention tragen die Wissenschaftler der Dr. Brill + Partner GmbH Institut für Hygiene und Mikrobiologie wieder zum wissenschaftlichen Programm bei. Folgende Vorträge werden in Ulm präsentiert:Florian H. H. Brill, Horst Braunwarth, Dietmar Hegeholz, Werner Droste: Bestimmung der Wanderungsgeschwindigkeit von Bakterien im harnableitenden System beim Urostoma.Florian H. H. Brill: Flächendesinfektion mit Tuchsystemen – Sichere Infektionsprävention und hohe Compliance im Rahmen des Schülke & Mayr Lunch Symposiums.Florian H. H. Brill, Jan-Hendrik Klock, Ulrike Ißleib, Henrik Gabriel: Hygienische Aufbereitung von Ultraschallsonden mit einem Desinfektionstuchsystem in Anlehnung an den 4-Felder-Test und DIN EN ISO 17664.Florian H. H. Brill, Nadine Radischat, Peter-Goroncy-Bermes, Jörg Siebert: Antiseptischer Langzeiteffekt von Octenidinhydrochlorid versus Chlorhexidingluconat in alkoholischen Lösungen.Florian H. H. Brill, Alvin Ilocto, Jan-Hendrik Klock, Henrik Gabriel: Untersuchungen zur Weiterentwicklung des 4 Felder-Tests (prEN 16615).

Hamburg, 8 - 9 October 2015 Dr. Brill + Partner GmbH - Institute for Hygiene and Microbiology and the DR. BRILL ACADEMY proudly present in association with Life Science Nord GmbH the first Conference of Applied Hygiene, Microbiology and Virology in Hamburg, Germany.It is a pleasure to announce that we are able to welcome the following key-note speakers:Prof. Dr. Marylyn M. Addo, University Hospital Hamburg Eppendorf, one of the world's leading experts for clinical development of vaccination against Ebola and MERS-Corona. Topic: Infection Prevention in Emerging Infections - Lessons learned from Ebola and MERS-Corona-VirusProf. Dr. Ojan Assadian, University of Huddersfield, one of the worldwide well acknowledged and active hospital hygienist with focus on clinical implementation of infection prevention and control measurements. Topic: Release-kinetic of antiseptics from antimicrobial wound dressings and their clinical applicationThe preliminary program has just been released. All details can be found here (as at March 2015): http://www.brillhygiene.com/en/akademie/termine/conference-applied-hygiene-microbiology-and-virology. Just download our program with the registration form (here) and sign up now.Among others, the following sessions and workshops will be held:Efficacy Testing of Disinfectants and Antiseptics 2020 Special Focus on Hand Hygiene Products (Session)Reprocessing of Medical Devices according to ISO 17664 (Workshop)Microbiological Safety of Cosmetics (Session)As previously communicated, the conference will serve as a platform for scientific know-how and information transfer as well as a discussion forum focusing on efficacy testing, development, the conference will serve as a platform for scientific know-how and information transfer as well as a discussion forum focusing on efficacy testing, development, registration and application of infection prevention and control products such as disinfectants and antiseptics. The DR. BRILL ACADEMY seminars, annually performed since 2012, provided the basis for this conference. By extending the concept significantly, the conference will combine the knowledge of highly recognized experts of the applied sciences of hygiene, microbiology and virology with hands-on experiences from the user.The conference will be held on October 8th and 9th in the AMERON Hotel Speicherstadt Hamburg, which is located in the scenic and historic "Speicherstadt". Before the official opening of the conference on October 8th at 1 PM, a workshop covering the basics of microbiology, virology, efficacy testing and registration of infection control products will be held.We kindly invite specialists for research and development and registration from the infection prevention and control as well as medical device industry to attend the conference. Experts from competent authorities e.g. for biocidal product registration, interested scientists and medical doctors are also kindly welcomed to contribute to an open communication and know-how transfer between industry and user of the respective products.Please sign up now. We would be more than happy to welcome you this October here in Hamburg.Your scientific committee of the Conference of Applied Hygiene, Microbiology and Virology (in alphabetical order):Dr. Florian H. H. BrillDr. Holger BrillPD Dr. Eike SteinmannDr. Jochen SteinmannPD Dr. Jörg Steinmann

Hygienic hand disinfection is one of the most important measures to prevent viral infections in hospitals and other medical facilities. Guidelines strictly emphasize the urgent need of hand hygiene procedures with alcohol-based hand rubs. Its application requires products with a proven efficacy against model viruses evaluated in a quantitative suspension test and/or on artificial contaminated finger pads (ASTM 1838-10) or the entire hand (ASTM 2011-09). Unfortunately, both ASTM methods do not follow the clinical practice in hospitals and other medical facilities.So far there is no method available in Europe to determine the antiviral efficacy on contaminated hands. Nowadays, efforts by the CEN committee (virus task group) are undertaken to develop a method which resembles both contamination and hand treatment in clinical practice as closely as possible. In the WI (work item) 00216088 the recent developments are described.The murine norovirus (MNV) is chosen as test virus. The finger pads (including the thumb) are inoculated in 0.5 ml of the contamination fluid (murine norovirus suspension) in 12 or 24 well plates for 15 s. Then surplus liquid is carefully allowed to drain back into the container for a maximum of 30 s. Fingers are dried under the safety cabinet for 3 min.For hand hygiene 3 ml of the hand disinfectant are poured into the cupped dry hands and rubbed vigorously for 30 seconds onto the skin up to the wrists in accordance with the standard hand rub (EN 1500) procedure to ensure total coverage of the hands.Immediately at the end sampling from each fingertip (including the thumb) is started with 1 ml sample fluid per finger. Therefore, each fingertip is rubbed for 1 min on the base of a small Petri dish with 1 ml cell culture medium. Finally, the titer of residual virus is determined.The virus lab of Dr. Brill + Partner in Bremen is involved in the still running ring trials in Europe since the beginning together with 2 other labs in Europe and one lab in the United States. Recently, studies were performed in these 4 labs to find out the reference testing different concentrations of ethanol.Studies are still on-going for developing the European test method for evaluating the virus inactivation on artificially contaminated hand. Dr. Brill + Partner GmbH will continuously participate in these studies. A previous study done in our lab in Bremen independently from these European efforts has been published in 2012 demonstrating the large competence in this field.J. Steinmann, D. Paulmann, B. Becker, B. Bischoff, E. Steinmann, J. Steinmann: Comparison of virucidal activity of alcohol-based hand sanitizers versus antimicrobial hand soaps in vitro and in vivo.  J Hosp Infect (82): 277-280 (2012)If you have further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

In September 2014, the first phase 2/step 2 European standard prEN 16777 for virucidal efficacy testing of surface disinfectants on non-porous stainless steel discs was published. With adenovirus type 5 and murine norovirus (MNV) strain S99 as test viruses, the use-recommendations of surface disinfectants will strongly improve because there is a practice-like test method for virucidal efficacy evaluation available.To this day, the EN 14476 (phase 2, step 1) as quantitative suspension test with polio-, adeno- and norovirus serves as the basis for efficacy evaluation of surface disinfectants. The successful inactivation test according to EN 14476 allowed a virucidal claim of the product. But the extent of virus inactivation by chemical means often completely differs when testing in vitro (quantitative suspension test) and in vivo (carrier test). After introduction of the prEN 16777 a test simulating practical conditions is now available which will allow more realistic use-recommendations (virucidal claim) and which will be the basis together with EN 14476 for biocidal product registration in Europe.In this prEN, a test virus suspension together with a soil load (virus inoculum) is dried on a stainless steel disc before the disinfectant is added. After the chosen exposure time has been reached a recovery process is followed to determine residual viral infectivity on the carriers. Our lab is highly experienced in carrier tests and was significantly involved in the development of the method. In 2008, we already started to study the efficacy of various active ingredients of disinfectants against the murine norovirus as new surrogate of human norovirus in the carrier test (Magulski et al. 2009). Furthermore, we participated in the ring trials of DVV with the same topic (Rabenau et al. 2014) and in all European carrier ring trials with MNV and adenovirus type 5. In addition, the lab took part in the OECD ring trial with adenovirus testing PAA based formulations in 2008.

From February 1 - 3, 2015 the 3rd Emirati German Medical Congress will be held in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. On February 2 starting from 3:30 p.m. Dr. Florian H. H. Brill and Mr. Martin Orlick will lead a workshop focusing on infection prevention and control 2020.Date: 1 - 3 February, 2015Time: 9:00 - 17:00Venue: Building M25-  Al Razi Auditorium – Medical and of Health Sciences CampusTarget Audience: All Healthcare ProfessionalsFor details and registration, kindly please visit this page http://www.uosctc.com/Emiratigermancongress.html Abstract Workshop: Infection Prevention and Control 2020:Modern medicine presents huge challenges for healthcare workers. These include understanding new scientific information, regulatory requirements, documentation, study results as well as innovative medicine, treatment strategies and devices in their daily practice. Sometimes hands on patient care drifts into the background due to these challenges. In addition, new developments such as telemedicine and medical tourism have changed patient care from one single local physician with their team overseeing patient care to an international team of specialized medical staff, which in some cases do not even know each other. Despite this, patient well-being and safety needs to be a fundamental part of all patient care and has to be our central aim. One quality marker and safety aspect for both patient and staff is the rate of complications such as nosocomial infections. Therefore, infection prevention and control has globally become of growing importance over the past years. In times of Multi-Drug-Resistant Organisms (MDRO) such as MRSA, ESBL and VRE, international as well as national programs are needed to ensure patient safety.Patients are aware of these challenges and expect excellent hygienic conditions during their contact with the healthcare system. At the same time patients are more mobile and do not only select the best facility in their city or country, but also consider other countries or regions for their planned hospital stays. This also challenges the infection prevention and control strategies as demonstrated during the influenza pandemic, where the H1N1 viruses spread along flight routes rapidly throughout the world. Infection prevention and control is one important key quality and influences all processes of clinical practice. Therefore, it has to be managed professionally and used as a major management tool to avoid a loss in efficiency of the clinical staff and their processes. The global WHO campaign for patient safety „Clean Care is Safer Care“ led my Professor Didier Pittet from Geneva, for example, is one campaign focusing on increasing the awareness of hand hygiene importance. It includes more than 120 countries and promotes hand hygiene with alcohol-based hand rubs.With ICAP, we provide an infection prevention and control accreditation program for healthcare facilities such as hospitals, dental and veterinary clinics. Our infection prevention and control program is approved by German hygiene experts, in the process of the international ISQua accreditation and meets international standards such as US-CDC, European-CDC and German Robert-Koch-Institute as well as the regional GCC-standards. Globally, the importance of hygiene increases constantly. Therefore, our ICAP certificate shows to potential patients that the risk for a post-operative infection is as low as technically possible, which is very important especially for patients that visit a particular country for a medical treatment and leave the country before any clinical infection may become obvious.

The final EN 16615 will be published in 2015. This is a completely new phase 2 step 2 test protocol for efficacy evaluation of surface disinfection procedures that has been developed mainly by the group of Dr. Jürgen Gebel of the University Hospital in Bonn, Germany. For the first time, a practice-like test is available for efficacy testing of wipe systems, which are used increasingly in the clinical practice. On a large PVC-carrier (20 x 50 cm) the impregnated wipe will be applied with a standardized procedure to simulate the disinfection of small surfaces. Disinfectants can be tested with a defined standard wipe or a different wipe, which is recommend by the manufacturer, also ready to use wipe systems can be tested according to the so called "4-field-test". The name comes from the fact that in this test assay not only the disinfecting efficacy on a contaminated surface is tested, but also the spread to other parts of the carrier. This will be tested on the remaining 3 fields, which have not been contaminated upfront. We participated at the CEN ring trials and established this method in our lab as a standard method. The test results from more than 30 different formulation show that the 4-field-test is challenging for the test preparations.We are performing efficacy testing of wipe systems since 2007. We developed our own method based on the EN 13697 and DGHM 2001, method 14. The published literature and our data are showing that there are many details influencing the efficacy of these systems including application method, impregnation volume and time, type of wipe fabric, processing of the fabric, type of disinfectant solution. We are sure that some of these and other new aspects influencing the efficacy testing of wipe systems will be discussed in the near future.If you have further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Hamburg, 8 - 9 October 2015 Dr. Brill + Partner GmbH - Institute for Hygiene and Microbiology and the DR. BRILL ACADEMY proudly present in association with Life Science Nord GmbH the first Conference of Applied Hygiene, Microbiology and Virology in Hamburg, Germany. The conference will serve as a platform for scientific know-how and information transfer as well as a discussion forum focusing on efficacy testing, development, registration and application of infection prevention and control products such as disinfectants and antiseptics. The DR. BRILL ACADEMY seminars, annually performed since 2012, provided the basis for this conference. By extending the concept significantly, the conference will combine the knowledge of highly recognized experts of the applied sciences of hygiene, microbiology and virology with hands-on experiences from the user. Kindly see below an extract of the program:Efficacy testing of disinfectants and antiseptics 2020, special focus on efficacy testing of hand hygiene products, Chair: Dr. Jochen Steinmann and Dr. Florian H. H. Brill, Dr. Brill + Partner GmbH Institute for Hygiene and Microbiology, HamburgHot topic virus transmission, epidemics and control, Ebola, Hepatitis C, MERS-Corona, Chair: PD Dr. Eike Steinmann, University Hospital Hannover and Twincore Research Center, HannoverEpidemiology and Control of Multi-Drug-Resistant Organisms, Chair: PD Dr. Jörg Steinmann, University Hospital EssenMicrobiological Safety of Cosmetics, Chair: Dr. Ulrich Eigener, Hamburg.The conference will be held on October 8th and 9th in the Ameron Speicherstadt Hotel in Hamburg, which is located in the scenic and historic "Speicherstadt". Before the official opening of the conference on October 8th at 1 PM, a workshop covering the basics of microbiology, virology, efficacy testing and registration of infection control products will be held.We kindly invite specialists for research and development and registration from the infection prevention and control as well as medical device industry to attend the conference. Experts from competent authorities e.g. for biocidal product registration, interested scientists and medical doctors are also kindly welcomed to contribute to an open communication and know-how transfer between industry and user of the respective products.Please save the date. We would be more than happy to welcome you in Hamburg. For pre-registration please send an email to Mrs Gesche von der Lieth (gesche.vonderlieth@brillhygiene.com). Further conference details including the program will be communicated very soon and published on our website www.brillhygiene.com.Your scientific committee of the Conference of Applied Hygiene, Microbiology and Virology (in alphabetical order):Dr. Florian H. H. BrillDr. Holger BrillPD Dr. Eike SteinmannDr. Jochen SteinmannPD Dr. Jörg Steinmann