Practices of radiation sterilization of medical products and pharmaceutical preparations: egyptian experience

Radiation sterilization involves the application of sufficient ionizing energy furnished by either x-rays, gamma-rays or accelerated electron beams, to render an article free of viable micro-organisms. The method offers a number of advantages which makes it an attractive choice in a number of situations: It is a suitable means of sterilizing many many materials.. Radiation causes no significant temperature rise, thus permits sterilization of heat-sensitive drugs and low melting-point plastics. It is certainly the best, and often the only method of sterilizing biological tissues and preparations of biological origin. due to its high penetrating ability, gamma-radiation reaches all parts of the object to be sterilized. The radiation sterilized products are not subjected to touching or exposure to the outside environment except by the and users. The chemical reactivity of radiation is relatively low as compared with the highly reactive gases. Radiation can be easily adapted for continuous processing as compared with batch operations currently in use with gas sterilization. The radiation process is the most reliable of all competing sterilization methods due to the obsolete certainty that the radiation source emits radiation of known energy and power