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CLEANING TOYS ~
INSURING
SAFE TOY PLAY |
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CLEANING TOYS
INSURING SAFE PLAY
Toys made of metal, plastic
derivatives or fiberglass are not easily damaged by a higher
percentage solution of bleach or a longer soak time, so they
are easy to clean - a 15 minute soak in bleach water and a
rinse is adequate for us to be sure that there are no
infectious pathogens left viable (alive) on the toy. Toys
made of wood, some kinds of rubber, cloth or synthetic
fiber, such as the nylon cracker on a singletail, stand up
reasonably well to up to a 20% or even 25% solution of
bleach and water, but may degrade over time. It is a good
idea to wash these toys with soap and water to remove traces
of the bleach solution after soaking. Some toys may be
autoclaved if real sterility is desired.
Leather toys, especially expensive
ones such as floggers, are much more difficult to adequately
clean if they are exposed to potentially infectious body
fluids. Bleach will damage leather fairly quickly, though
your leather toys will last longer if professional leather
care solutions are used in addition to the bleach solution.
Purchase leather care and conditioning products at saddle
and tack shops or retail leather clothing outlets, and make
sure you have the right one for the type of leather that was
used to make your toy.
Depending on its weight and
manufacture, some leather will actually survive one
autoclaving, but some won't, and it's an expensive
proposition to find out which is which. I doubt any leather
could survive repeated autoclaving. (Hint: rawhide
*definitely* does not make it, and dyes fade.)
More leather-friendly (but much more
expensive) alternatives to bleach or boiling include
solutions like ClinASept, a hospital sterilizing wash, or
another full spectrum viricide/antiseptic, sometimes in
combination with an extended period of being left dry and
unused as an additional precaution.
Some experiments have been done on
the viral and antiseptic properties of various types of
radiation ranging from simple sunlight to more complicated
forms, but the jury still seems to be out on the results.
Certainly some exposure to sunlight won't hurt, and may even
help, if some scientists' theories turn out to be right.
Microwaving on low power has also been suggested, but I am
not certain of the efficacy of this technique and I am
certain that it can cause scorching and warping.
Humidity is definitely an important
factor in the length of time that a pathogen can survive
outside a human host, and a dry environment is much less
pathogen friendly than a humid one. There are some bacterial
spores known to be able to survive an extended dry period,
but most authorities agree that the virus that causes AIDS
does not survive well outside the human body for any
significant length of time.
Contagious body fluids include
blood, plasma, semen, vaginal fluids and saliva. Urine and
feces can also carry pathogens. Simple skin contact, even if
the skin is sweaty, is not considered sufficient as a vector
of direct (or indirect) transmission of any known pathogen.
So it is generally safe to use a leather flogger on more
than one person's back or ass in succession, assuming that
no one has broken skin. Washing in between with saddle soap
(or a suitable suede care product if you own a soft flogger)
is not a bad idea for general hygiene, but hardly a dire
necessity if the instrument has touched only unbroken skin.
This is not always a safe
assumption. Pimples or "zits" are effectively
broken skin, and they are not an uncommon occurrence.
Likewise minute scratches, scrapes or pinpricks; horsehair
whips are particularly good at creating these tiny breaks in
the epidermis, and stiff, scratchy-edged leather can do the
same kind of almost unseen damage. But how likely is it in
reality that an infection could be transmitted this way?
Ignoring for now the vectors of
airborne transmission and animal bites, the way the diseases
we tend to worry about get transmitted is by direct or
indirect contact with infectious body fluids. Direct contact
means that you touch the fluid directly. Indirect contact is
what we are trying to prevent by cleaning our toys. If
something that has touched infected fluid touches you, that
is indirect contact.
Four conditions need to be present for
transmission of the disease to occur:
1. The disease pathogen must be present.
Ie, the person whose body fluids you have contacted must
have the disease (or more accurately, must harbor the
pathogenic organism, whether or not disease symptoms have
developed). If neither person in a couple has any disease,
you can exchange any body fluid you want except for urine
and feces in complete safety. Waste products have some
special problems and associated risks even if you ingest
your own, though urine tends to be a problem only in
quantity or over an extended period. Warning: it is not
always easy to know if you are completely free from
infectious disease, even if you have been recently tested,
as some diseases can have a long incubation period.
2. The infected fluid must contact mucus
membrane (wet places) or broken skin in order to enter
your body. "Infectious pathogens will not cross
intact skin; however, they will enter through cuts and
mucus membrane quite easily." (Brady Emergency Care,
Grant, Murray and Bergeron, sixth edition) Note that
broken skin does not always have to be obvious - a pimple,
a hangnail, a minute scratch or a papercut is broken skin.
You have mucus membrane in your eyes, nose, mouth, rectum
and urethra or vagina.
3. The recipient must be vulnerable to
the disease, ie, not immune. Since there is not currently
an effective vaccine for AIDS (though there is one for
most strains of hepatitis), you can assume you are not
immune and you are vulnerable to disease.
4. There must be a sufficient quantity
of the pathogen present in viable (alive) form to cause a
disease. Under field conditions (ie, in your bedroom or
dungeon, outside a laboratory), we don't know what
constitutes a sufficient quantity. We can guess that
aeration of minute specks of vaporized fluid, such as is
caused in the operating room by surgeons using high speed
cutting or drilling instruments, or by a single-tail
cracking after it has drawn blood, is probably not a
sufficient quantity. We can guess (but cannot be sure)
that fluid that has been outside the body for a
significant length of time is less likely to contain
viable disease organisms. We can make that guess a lot
closer to a sure thing by applying proven viricidal and
antiseptic solutions for a length of time known to kill
100% of pathogenic organisms. However, one drop of blood
can definitely carry a high enough concentration of
pathogens to transmit successfully if the other conditions
are fulfilled.
A corollary is that the contact must
persist for an adequate length of time for the pathogen to
be transmitted. Under field conditions (ie, in your bedroom
or dungeon, outside a laboratory), we don't know what is an
adequate length of time. We are pretty sure that washing off
the infected fluid as soon as possible does reduce the
chance of transmission.
Because materials like leather, cloth and
hair are porous, they provide a more pathogen-friendly
environment for organisms to survive in. Complete
sterilization is more difficult, and by hospital standards
of real sterility basically impossible. Well made cloth will
actually stand up to heavy duty cleaning better than most
types of leather, which are easily damaged by anything that
significantly changes their chemistry.
What does that mean in your dungeon, since
you are (presumably) not using your flogger to perform any
major surgeries? Basically, you can't seriously break skin
on one person with a leather toy and then clean it
sufficiently to break skin on a second person without some
*awfully* heroic efforts in between that will probably
destroy the flogger if done correctly, ie, in a way that
causes the sterilizing agent to completely penetrate the
leather and remain there for a length of time sufficient to
kill any organisms.
How much of a risk are you taking by
re-using a flogger that has broken skin? Again, the factors
that control disease transmission are presence of pathogen
(somebody actually has to have the disease), amount of
pathogen (was it barely a smear, or really wet with blood,
and did you reduce the amount of fluid or the viability of
the pathogens in the fluid by wiping, washing, drying or
applying a sterilizing solution?), vulnerability to the
pathogen (if you've been successfully vaccinated against
hepatitis, you can't get those strains) and point of entry
(infected fluid must contact mucus membrane or broken skin)
and length of exposure time (how fast did you wash it off).
Those are the factors that influence your
risk level. You can choose the level of precaution you want
to take. Since AIDS is a fatal disease, most people prefer
to err on the side of caution.
When I have contacted significantly broken
skin with leather toys, I soaked them thoroughly with
ClinASept (a hospital viricide/antiseptic solution that is
specifically known and tested to be effective against HIV)
and left them long enough for the solution to penetrate the
leather completely, about 20 minutes. A wash in saddle soap
and warm water to remove the solution followed, after which
the toy was retired for a few weeks (except for a rub or two
with leather conditioner) to hang up and dry. I find it
highly unlikely that any pathogens at all could survive this
treatment, let alone pathogens in sufficient quantity to be
viably transmitted. The leather does survive, though I would
not recommend repeating this treatment any more often than
necessary.
Note that I have never allowed a leather
toy to become really soaked with blood. These precautions
are taken at the first signs of broken skin, and if we
wanted play to continue past this point, we would switch to
using another instrument such as a singletail with a nylon
cracker or a cane. I do not know if these techniques would
be adequate to clean seriously bloodstained leather, so I
suspect I would simply retire a toy if one ever got to this
stage by accident. As leather is expensive, I save my
floggers for warm-up toys and move on to more easily
cleanable instruments if we continue to play, well before
skin gets broken.
As a standard precaution if I even vaguely
suspect a leather toy may have brushed slightly broken skin,
I give it an immediate surface misting of ClinASept and a
good wash in saddle soap and water about twenty minutes
later. I can attest that quality leather toys will survive
years of this treatment.
You are free to choose your own level of
risk, and the smartest way to do this is to keep well
informed and up to date on what the factors are that
actually control your risk of getting a disease or giving it
to your partner.
We're always seeking
new articles, ideas and forms of PeePlay and W/S. If you
have any suggestions, please feel free to email them to us
at submit@peeplay.net.
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