Cell phones may be a potential source of bacterial contamination in the operating room Cell phones have begun to become an integral part of people’s daily lives, and the convenience of smart phones has led to a dramatic increase in the number of people with their heads down on their cell phones, even if surgeons are not exempt. According to the operating room regulations, as a relatively clean area, there are strict requirements for environmental control in the operating room. In some hospitals, there are regulations that cell phones cannot be brought into the operating room, and this is how it is played out on TV, but the fact is that the vast majority of surgeons can’t do it, and brushing the traffic in between surgeries, making phone calls from the ward, and accessing knowledge related to the surgery are all excellent reasons for cell phones to be in the operating room. Recently, Irshad and other scholars used a simple method to study whether cell phones could be a potential source of contamination in the operating room, and published the findings in the internationally renowned orthopedic journal JBJS, so let’s all have a taste of this lofty experiment. The test methodology was simple: the researchers collected bacterial specimens from the front and back of 53 surgeons’ cell phones and cultured them three times: before sterilization, after sterilization, and one week later. The researchers found that 83% (44) of the 53 phone specimens were found to be pathogenic the first time they were cultured, and only 8% (4) of the phone specimens were found to be pathogenic after they were sterilized; the percentage of pathogenic bacteria rose to 75% (40) when the specimens were collected again one week after the procedure was sterilized. In addition to the differences in the types of bacteria detected, the number of bacterial colonies differed significantly between pre- and post-sterilization, and one week post-sterilization, with 3,488 colonies before and 200 colonies after sterilization and 1,825 colonies one week after sterilization, respectively. The authors suggest that smartphones that need to be brought into the operating room should be sterilized on a regular and regular basis; phones used in daily life also need to be sterilized regularly to reduce the probability of bacterial contamination. Given that the bacterial species of the phones returned to high levels even after one week of sterilization, the authors recommend that phones should be sterilized at intervals of less than one week.