Microbial Contamination on the Clothes Part 2 : Evalution of Antimicrobial Activity of Antimicrobial-Finished Textiles

In this study, the antimicrobial activities of two types of commercial antimicrobial-finished textiles, two antimicrobial-and deordrant-finished textiles (Textile A) and one MRSA-inhibiting textile (Textile B), were evaluated using two methods. One is a direct method by which the antimicrobial activity of the textiles against two strains of Staphylococcus aureus (MSSA and MRSA) and one strain of Klebsiella pneumoniae was directly measured, and the othe is a wearing method by which the number of bacteria transferred from foot skin to textile-paches on wearing was counted. The resulsts were sa follows. 1. Both of the Textile A showed similar activity by two methods. 2. One of the Textile A showed no antimicrobial activity, but the other showed considerable activity against all strains. The wearing method showed that the latter textile has the ability to decrease the transferred bacteria to one-tenth compared with untreated textile (10^3-10^4cfu/cm^2). 3. Textile B showed antimicrobial activity against not only MRSA but also MSSA and K. pneumoniae. It was, however, demonstrated by the wearing method that this textile is not effective to reduce cotaminated bacteria. Consequently, special care should be paid to quality control, since it is difficult for consumers to evaluate the quality of antimicrobial-finished textile by their appearance.