Again, it's for myself as well as clients.
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| So much bureaucracy, so few rules for general housekeepers. |
When I say "infection control," I mean disinfection, or containing and killing germs.
Unless you're doing institutional kitchen or health care cleaning, how you go about it is your own business.
That always bothered me.
I am kind of a stickler for "the rules" in general, but when it comes to cleaning, the rules for killing germs can mean the difference between disinfecting a bathroom and spreading bathroom germs all over the house.
I could tell you some horror stories, but I won't.
Let's just say that I have seen some pretty icky cleaning practices. I spent a good bit of time online and with my nose in books looking for formal government regulations covering housekeeping, and there really aren't any. A regular housekeeper has to look long and hard and be a little creative to find official guidance.
OSHA
OSHA, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, has some standards for the workplace, as in keeping cleaners safe or keeping the environment for workers safe. The agency has specific directives for how to handle industrial hazards like work platforms, ventilation and chemicals. Contrary to the clip art at the top of that page at this moment, it doesn't give much guidance for maid-type cleaning except that "all places of employment, passageways, storerooms and service rooms shall be kept clean and orderly and in a sanitary condition." Here's a handy fact-sheet that spells out the not-too-helpful standards.
To be fair, it's not OSHA's job to protect cleaning service clients. The agency protects workers from their companies and themselves, period.
Even so, there are two directives that all cleaners should be familiar with for their own safety and that of clients:
Hazard Communication Standard. This one requires that employers label hazardous materials and train employees how to handle them correctly. For cleaners, that means knowing what's in every one of the spray bottles we run around with and knowing what hazard each may present by itself or in combination with others. That's where I got the idea to post Material Safety Data Sheets for the three commercial cleaners I have in my arsenal. (Mine are pretty funny. The cleaners are so mild that there isn't a lot of hazard information to list.) It's important for cleaners to understand the chemicals they're using, and I'd say clients would also want to know what's getting sprayed and swabbed all over their places.
Bloodborne Pathogens Standard. This is a big one. It was devised at the end of the 1980s to protect healthcare workers from exposure to the AIDS virus. And, even though bugs for that, as well as hepatitis, tuberculosis, some blood cancers and exotic diseases like mad cow and ebola don't confine themselves to hospitals, that's pretty much where the rule has stayed. Technically, "any employee who has occupational exposure to blood or other potentially infectious material will be included within the scope of this standard," but, in four years of on-and-off cleaning, the only place I saw follow this standard religiously was a little manufacturing outfit that sent a trained manager out to clean up whenever a worker dripped blood in the plant. Blood and body fluids are everyday dirt in the toilet scrubbing business, but, for some reason, menstrual blood, vomit and bathroom waste don't count (OSHA spells that out in this FAQ), and I have never once heard mention of it in a professional cleaning job. That Q&A says that wastes aren't suspect unless visibly contaminated with blood, and that female sanitary products and waste containers keep menstrual blood acceptably contained. Obviously the writers have never cleaned a public restroom.
EPA
Above's not an awful lot to go on. There's a little more semi-applicable guidance over at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA? Well, that agency regulates pesticides. And since bacteria and viruses are bugs, that's who decides which chemicals can be called disinfectants..
The main thing the EPA does is enforce standards for labeling and effectiveness of disinfecting and sterilizing chemicals. So me saying I have an "EPA registered" disinfectant means that I found an unscented, nontoxic cleaner that has proven to the EPA that it gets rid of certain germs in a certain amount of time. (No small feat. I dare you to find others.) Only chemicals sold for healthcare and foodservice disinfection have to meet EPA standards.
CDC
You want to know how to use those disinfectants? If they're EPA-registered, they will have plenty information for how much and how to use to kill which kind of bugs on the label. If you want to see the government's official line on disinfection, you have to go over to the Centers for Disease Control.
The CDC doesn't care what regular residential and commercial housekeepers do either. Their rules concern medical facilities and equipment. You can find the 158-page PDF of their Guidelines for Disinfection and Sterilization in Healthcare Facilities here. Yeah, I know, your cleaning lady's probably not going to encounter a dirty surgical table or endoscope, but stay with me here. That document spells out top-level cleaning practices for those and "noncritical" surfaces, those that would be most akin to the ones in your household. It also lays out the different types of disinfectants and the proper uses for each. Bleach, ammonia, hydrogen, peroxide, alcohol, those are pretty common. As are quaternary ammonium compounds, aldehydes and phenolic derivatives.(Here is a very nice paper on what's in household chemicals put out by a University of Tennessee research center.) If you want to see what's in your cleaners, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (yes, yet another federal agency) has a handy cross-referenced database here.
Whew. That's a lot of alphabet soup. It took me half the morning to hunt down the links and verify what I already knew from reading this and that over the past few years.
What does that all mean? It means that general cleaning services don't have much incentive to keep you, the client, and me, the cleaner, safe from chemical and germ hazards. It also means that getting involved in associations and getting to know niche professionals who know this stuff cold is imperative for any cleaner. And, lastly but not leastly, it explains how I cobbled together the chemicals and procedures I use to clean.
