Hepatitis B Information for the Crime Scene Cleaner

Hepatitis B Information for the Crime Scene Cleaner

Here's another good reason to keep your distance from blood and OPIM. This sucker likes the open air on hard surfaces, transmits by needle or sharps stick easily enough, and can be found wherever drug abuse occurs (our work place often enough) as well as hospitals.

Hepatitis B's infection rate in the USA is about 0.5 percent of the population.
It is primarily transmitted by blood injected from needle stick and sharps. Drug abuse accounts for many cases of this viral disease because of needle sharing.

Instances of mother to child infection during pregnancy occur.
It is also a sexually transmitted disease and annal intercourse proves it to pass about 1:, 3 females for every male. Among male homosexual annal (sodimizers?) appears to equal between receiver and penetrator.

The virus has shown "stability" for seven days on flat, non-porous surfaces in enclosed environmental surfaces, which gives it a potential for "indirect inoculation of HBV" and can "occur by inanimate object inoculation."

It seems clear to me that keeping one's hands in sight at all times, working slowly and deliberately, and avoiding sharps is an important part of cleaning biohazardous environments because of hepatitis B, HBV.

I will continue to fog and/or ozone first, ask questions later, and then spray my way to the scene.
Source: Control of Communicable Diseases Manual, 2008, page 286.

eddie evans
crime scene cleanup