Assessing Trailer Cleanliness
An important step in maintaining biosecurity is proper washing and disinfection of transport trailers. Visual inspection is not aa reliable assessment for measuring cleanliness. Using microbiological culture works, though the plating of media and incubation time make it somewhat impractical as test results take awhile to get back. An alternative to this is to use ATP bioluminescence as results only take minutes to produce. Pros and cons of this technique are listed in the table. Variance in meters was found in the test sites that may be related to environmental contamination, with this occurring in the summer months as trailers dried outside. ATP bioluminescence is a cheap and reliable method for assessing cleanliness of trailers.
Assessing Trailer Cleanliness (full article)
