For well over half a century, Medical Wire has been serving microbiologists, and other diagnostic professionals, enabling them to obtain the high quality specimens essential for accurate investigations. In the early years it provided customers with the materials to produce their own collection devices such as swabs, inoculating loops, and dip slides, but over the years this has given way to the supply of pre-packed validated devices, ready for use by the busy nurse taking a specimen from a patient, the quality manager sampling food contact surfaces in a meat processing plant, or the policemen collecting forensic evidence at a crime scene.

In 1975 Medical Wire launched Transwab®, the first complete ready-to-use transport swab kit complete with swab and tube of semi-solid transport medium, suitable for all microorganisms. This was followed by Virocult®, with a medium dedicated to virus isolation.

Many other innovations have followed, such as our dedicated ranges for the food and pharmaceutical industries. These include NRS Transwab® rinse swabs, and Polywipe™ sponge swabs for the measurement of residual contamination on disinfected surfaces. A range of Isolation Transwabs® enable the easy detection of common pathogens such as Listeria and Coliforms in food production environments.

In the laboratory our Microloops® range of inoculating loops has served several generations of microbiologists, both our traditional long-life nichrome and platinum loops, and more recently our disposable plastic Classic Microloops®. Rapid Test Strips™ and Microrings® are convenient tests for the identification of many important bacteria, and fungi, and Viabank™ is a frozen bead storage system for the preservation of laboratory strains and those valuable isolates.

Medical Wire's clinical products are CE-marked as medical devices (up to Class IIa), or in vitro medical devices, manufactured to ISO 13485:2003, and where appropriate, registered with the United States FDA. All clinical Transwab® products are compliant with the CLSI standard M40-A (for the Quality Control of Microbiology Specimen Transport Devices). All our clinical and non-clinical products are also manufactured to ISO 9000:2000.