To The Editor:

Nathan L. Belkin, Ph.D.

Clearwater, FL

Having been a member of the Garment Committee of the original American Association for Contamination Control (A2C2) and its successor group functioning under the auspices of the Institute of Environmental Sciences (IES), I found the articles written by C.W. Berndt (“What You Should Demand From Your Cleanroom Garment Manufacturer,” CleanRooms, Oct. 1994, p.18), and those by Stuart A. Hoenig (“Bacterial Contamination in Air Conditioning Systems: How Does it Get Into the Cleanroom?,” CleanRooms, Nov. 1994, p.16), and Pam Schodt (“Building Suits Provide Cost-effective Contamination Control,” CleanRooms, Nov. 1994, p.14) to be most interesting. However, what is rather unusual is the fact that although they were obviously independently prepared, they are, nevertheless, related.

For example, Berndt focused on the features of a garment in terms of its influence and capability to contain contamination. Along those lines as well, Schodt addresses the requirements of a fabric that are needed to reduce the generation of contamination. Last, but not least, Hoenig has written about the bacterial contamination found in the cleanroom.

Overall, therefore, all three actually deal with contamination. To that extent, nothing has changed since those “good old days,” because there is still one component in the process that continues to escape the scrutiny of the cleanroom technology. Specifically, it is the physiological phenomena by which the human contamination is generated. After all of these years, it would seem reasonable to believe that some attention would, at long last, be directed at the source.