Vivarium Decon: DIY or Call for Help?

This is Part 3 of our four-part series on QuipDecon decontamination services. We’ve covered who leads our decontamination team and what happens in the first 24 hours after contamination. This week we’re examining the critical decision between handling decontamination internally versus bringing in professional services.

Last week we talked about what happens in the first 24 hours after discovering contamination. This week: deciding whether to handle decontamination internally or bring in professional services.

Not every contamination event requires professional help. Some facilities have the expertise, equipment, and time to handle situations internally. Others benefit from bringing in specialists who can mobilize quickly and provide validated results.

When DIY Makes Sense

If your staff includes trained personnel with decontamination experience and your facility can take spaces offline for extended periods, internal handling can work well. The cost savings can be substantial when you’re not paying for rapid professional mobilization.

However, pathogen type matters. While some bacterial contaminations respond well to facility-executed protocols, spore-forming organisms, viral pathogens, and parasitic contaminations often require specialized expertise that most facilities don’t maintain in-house.

Practical Internal Decontamination

Pre-cleaning is non-negotiable. Organic soil inactivates disinfectants and shields bacteria from chemical exposure. Thorough removal of bedding, waste, and feed residue before disinfection is essential.

Select disinfectant based on contamination type and your build material compatibility:

Validating Your Efforts

After you’ve cleaned and disinfected, how do you know contamination is actually gone? Use these validation techniques:

• ATP testing identifies whether pre-cleaning actually worked by measuring residual organic matter on surfaces
• Biological indicators verify that disinfectant reached all surfaces and killed target organisms—essential for spore-forming contaminations
• Chemical indicators rapidly confirm that whole-room disinfection efforts are reaching critical areas
• Microbial plating provides definitive proof that no organisms remain after 72-hour culture

Some facilities skip validation and move straight from cleaning to disinfection. This is where decontamination fails silently.

Most facilities lack the equipment, training, and expertise to perform comprehensive validation themselves. If you can’t objectively demonstrate that contamination is eliminated, you’re operating on faith rather than evidence.

When Professional Services Make More Sense

Timeline pressure is often decisive. When research timelines demand rapid return to operation, professional services completing validated decontamination in 48-72 hours justify their cost through reduced downtime.

Spore-forming contaminations require sporicidal disinfectants (MB-10 or Halo) and multi-stage validation most facilities cannot perform. Uncertainty about whether contamination involves spores is itself reason to call for professional assessment.

Gnotobiotic integrity loss creates astronomical research costs—colony recovery takes 6+ months. Professional decontamination with documented validation is the only acceptable pathway back to gnotobiotic status.

Complex equipment such as that used for imaging can create require more complex decontamination procedures.

Complex pathogens (viruses, parasites) or unknown contamination benefit from professional expertise in organism identification and chemistry selection.

For any of these scenarios, professional services deliver documented proof that decontamination succeeded—not assumptions.

The Honest Assessment

The decision comes down to honest evaluation of your capabilities. Do you have trained staff available? Can you perform validation with ATP testing, biological indicators, and microbial analysis? Do you have the equipment and expertise to execute comprehensive decontamination?

Most facilities that answer these questions honestly realize they’re better served by bringing in specialists. Incomplete decontamination quickly leads to recontamination. Getting it right matters more than saving money on third party data contamination & validation.

Next Steps

Next week, we’ll walk through what professional decontamination actually involves: the assessment process, treatment methodologies, and validation approaches that separate professional services from routine cleaning.

Facing a contamination event and unsure which path makes sense? Call us at 800.424.2436 to discuss your specific situation. We can help you evaluate whether internal handling is realistic for your facility, or whether professional validation is the safer bet.