Tap water clean enough to treat wounds Medical workers in
disaster areas no longer have to wait for sterile equipment
before they clean and dress wounds, thanks to Australian
research. Professor Rhonda Griffiths, of the University of
Western Sydney's Centre for Applied Nursing, says as long as
water is good enough to drink, evidence suggests it will be good
enough to clean uninfected wounds. "We've demonstrated that some
of the traditional ways of doing dressings are unnecessarily
expensive and labour intensive," says Griffiths. She adds that
if there is any doubt that the tap water is suitable for
drinking, it can be boiled before use. Griffiths and colleagues
recently completed a systematic review of evidence for the
Cochrane Collaboration comparing the use of saline versus tap
water to clean uninfected wounds. The review found that washing
wounds, including leg ulcers, with water did not show an
increase in infection or decrease in healing time, compared to
using saline, she says. As a result, the Cochrane