The present invention relates to highly effective disinfection or sterilization cloths.

There is a great need for highly effective disinfection cloths and sterilization cloths, especially in the laboratory and medical sector. Examples of these are the sterilization of medical devices that cannot be autoclaved, for example endoscopes, and the cleaning of medical technology and laboratory equipment. In the cleaning of such devices, conventional disinfection cloths are often unsuitable owing to the limited or slow efficacy of the disinfectants used. This is especially true of alcohol, probably the most widely used disinfectant, which requires a relatively long contact time, but this is generally not achieved owing to vaporization.

As far as we know, just a single system to date achieves satisfactory efficacy by using chlorine dioxide as active ingredient; see, for example, WO2005107823, and US2014142489 and WO2015040366. Owing to the low stability of the chlorine dioxide active ingredient, the system described therein works by producing the active ingredient directly on use in that an activator spray is sprayed onto the preimpregnated wiping cloths and they are thus activated. This produces the chlorine dioxide required directly prior to use, and therefore the problem of storage stability is largely solved. However, the use of an activator spray to be operated manually leads in turn to another problem, namely the difficulty of the correct dosage of the activator. Owing to the variability in manual operation, this problem can only be solved to some degree in that the activator is always used in an excess dose. However, the effect of this is in turn that significant residues of the activator remain on the disinfected surface, and therefore recleaning of these surfaces is required to remove the excess activator.

However, this constitutes a significant problem for several reasons: more particularly, the recleaning operation with a now no longer sterilizing cloth can cause new contamination, which defeats the purpose of the prior sterilization, and reliable use of the system is actually no longer assured. A further operating step is likewise necessary, which, as well as new sources of error, in particular entails not inconsiderable additional time demands, and added costs both with regard to material and working time.

The present invention solves the problem in that the disinfection cloth impregnated with a component necessary for the production of chlorine dioxide is activated by contacting the disinfectant cloth with a clearly defined amount of an activating agent in liquid form that has been pre-packed as a single dose. This allows the amounts of the impregnation and the activator in each case to be matched accurately in the required stoichiometric ratio, or the excess of one component to be sufficiently small as to no longer require recleaning for removal of the excess of one component.

In principle, all chlorite or chlorate salts are useful as impregnation for the cloth, preferably sodium chlorite, sodium chlorate, potassium chlorite, potassium chlorate, ammonium chlorite or ammonium chlorate. Suitable activating agents for production of chlorine dioxide are in principle all known co-reactants for production of chlorine dioxide, preferably an agent from

Group 1:acids, further preferably: hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, phosphoric acid, peroxyacetic acid, carboxylic acids having an organic radical of C1-C40;persulfates;peroxodisulfates;perborates;percarbonates;peroxodicarbonates;permanganates, further preferably potassium permanganate;hypochlorites, further preferably sodium hypochlorite, potassium hypochlorite;iodineand/or hydrogen peroxide,
more preferably hydrochloric acid, peroxodisulfuric acid, phosphoric acid or hydrogen peroxide.

The activation liquid may in principle be packed in any form suitable for a single dose, preferably in a capsule or pouch. Useful packaging materials include all materials suitable for storage of the activating agent chosen, but preference is given to commercial plastics such as, in particular, polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polyamides (PA), polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) and polyurethanes (PU).

