Handling and measurement
Alcohol Swab
Last updated
A small sealed pad soaked in 70 percent isopropyl alcohol, used to wipe the rubber stopper before a needle goes through it and the skin before an injection. You wipe the spot once and then let it dry rather than fanning or blotting it. The drying time is not waiting around; it is the contact time during which the alcohol does its work.
Why it matters here
The stopper is wiped before every entry and not only the first, because it has been open to the room ever since the cap came off. Piercing while the surface is still wet also carries alcohol through with the needle, which is what makes an injection sting more than it needs to.
What it is not
Wiping is not sterilising. It reduces organisms on a surface that was already reasonably clean; it cannot rescue a vial contaminated on the inside, cannot make a visibly dirty surface safe, and does nothing whatsoever to the liquid within. It lowers risk at one boundary and guarantees nothing anywhere.
Also called
- alcohol swab
- alcohol wipe
- alcohol prep pad
- swab
- isopropyl
- ipa wipe
- 70% alcohol
- prep pad
Alcohol prep pad is the packaging name and IPA wipe uses the chemical abbreviation for isopropyl alcohol. The 70 percent figure is deliberate rather than a cost-saving dilution: the water in it is needed for the alcohol to act on cell proteins and it slows evaporation enough to give the contact time, which is why stronger alcohol is less effective rather than more.
Compounds carrying this term
None on file yet. This term is in the controlled vocabulary but no compound record currently uses it — which is a statement about our coverage, not about the term.