The real contamination of femoral head allografts washed with pulse lavage.

At the Tampere Bone Bank, all the discarded femoral heads from September 1997 to May 2000 were recultured. The grafts had been washed with pulse lavage at harvesting. 48 grafts had been discarded because of a positive culture and 85 with negative cultures because of positive or insufficient serological information. The femoral heads were split into halves, which were recultured as a whole in thioglycolate broth for 14 days. The contamination of previously culture positive and negative femoral heads did not differ. In only 2 cases did we find the same type of bacteria in the primary as in the new culture. Most of the primary contamination proved to be false positive. The real contamination seems to be very low, at least after pulse lavage washing of the femoral head.