Evaluation of a standard scrubbing method for the recovery of aerobic skin flora.

The most reliable method for sampling skin flora is still a matter of debate, although the subject is of importance in many fields ranging from clinical to basic research. For the evaluation of normal skin flora, Williamson and Kligman's scrub method is the most commonly used. In order to determine the value of this method, standardized for the evaluation of topical antimicrobial agents on aerobic skin flora, we compared its results to those obtained both from bacterial counts and from microscopic studies on biopsies performed at the same site. After different experiments had established the optimal experimental conditions on human and pig skin, a comparative study on six healthy subjects was carried out in the peri-umbilical area. The mean log numbers of aerobic bacteria in the scrub samples and in the biopsies were respectively, 3.1 and 2.9, which were not statistically significant. These numerical results were similar to those obtained by electron microscopy. Hence, the standard scrub method may be considered satisfactory for the recovery of aerobic bacteria from healthy human skin.