Treatments consisted of 1 or 5 flashes and every flash was manually
started at a rate of one pulse per 2 s. The time after the inoculation
until ILP treatment was accounted and ranged from 1 min
to 1 h. The decontamination effectiveness of the ILP treatment was
represented by the level of microbial inactivation determined as
log (N0/N) where N0 is the population in CFU/side of knife of the
control specimen (the population recovered from the surface of
the inoculated untreated knife) and N represents the population
in CFU/side of a knife after ILP treatment. All the experiments were
carried out in quadruplicate using the same culture on the same
day for every pair of trials (treatment and control) to minimize
sample variability.
The temperature of the knife surface was monitored with Testo
177-T4, temperature data logger (Testo AG, Lenzkirch, Germany)
with two external temperature probes attached.