Biohazard cleaning and decontamination

The reliable professionals at Local Trauma Clean provide biohazard remediation, decontamination, and sanitation after homicides, suicides, hoarding situations, accidents, and crime scenes, including fentanyl and other illicit drug lab remediation, and vehicle decontamination.

What is a biohazard?

A biohazard is any harmful virus, bacteria, or infectious biological agent that presents a risk to people and animals, either through infection or environmental exposure.

To many people, biohazard remediation, commonly known as crime scene cleanup, sounds like standard cleaning. In reality, the two couldn't be more different. Biohazard remediation is the removal, cleaning, and disinfection of blood, bodily fluids, and other potentially infectious materials after a death, accident, or communicable disease outbreak. Because of the high exposure risk to bloodborne pathogens, it's a specialty service that requires proper training, equipment, certification, and licensing.

Where are biohazards found?

Anywhere and everywhere, at your workplace, your dentist's or doctor's office, your children's school, or any public place.

Some examples of biohazards

• Human blood and blood products: including items contaminated with blood, and other body fluids or tissues that contain visible blood.
• Animal waste: animal carcasses and body parts, or any bedding used by animals known to be infected with pathogenic organisms.
• Human body fluids: semen, cerebrospinal fluid, pleural fluid, vaginal secretions, pericardial fluid, amniotic fluid, saliva, and peritoneal fluid.
• Microbiological waste: common in laboratory settings, specimen cultures, disposable culture dishes, discarded viruses, and devices used to transfer or mix cultures.
• Pathological waste: unfixed human tissue (excluding skin), waste biopsy materials, and anatomical parts from medical procedures or autopsies.
• Sharps waste: needles, glass slides and cover slips, scalpels, and IV tubing with the needle attached.

Biohazard levels, explained

Biological hazards are categorized by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) into four levels, from Level 1 (minimum risk) to Level 4 (extreme risk).

• Level 1: Bacteria and viruses posing minimal risk, such as Bacillus subtilis, canine hepatitis, E. coli, and chickenpox. Precautions are minimal, typically gloves and some facial protection.
• Level 2: Agents causing mild disease in humans or difficult to contract by aerosol, such as hepatitis A, B and C, some influenza A strains, Lyme disease, salmonella, mumps, measles, dengue fever, and HIV.
• Level 3: Agents that can cause severe to fatal disease but for which treatments or vaccines exist, such as anthrax, West Nile virus, SARS and MERS coronaviruses, SARS-CoV-2, hantaviruses, tuberculosis, typhus, yellow fever, and malaria.
• Level 4: Agents causing severe to fatal disease with no available vaccine or treatment, such as Marburg virus, Ebola virus, Lassa fever, and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever. Work at this level requires positive-pressure suits and sealed, multi-stage decontamination facilities.

Most residential and commercial scenes we attend involve Level 1 and Level 2 hazards, which our IICRC-certified technicians are trained and equipped to remediate safely.