Can You Sterilize Nebulizer Parts in a Bottle Sterilizer?
Boiling nebulizer cups on the stove every night gets old. The CF clinics allow an easier way, and the people who use it know what not to put in.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Every nebulizer treatment ends the same way: a cup in pieces by the sink, waiting for the pot. Somebody in r/CysticFibrosis who used to boil theirs on the stove every evening calls a baby-bottle sterilizer hands down the best thing they ever did.
If you or your child do nebulizer treatments and you're sick of the pot, the short answer is yes, with one condition attached.
The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation counts an electric steam sterilizer among the heat methods it accepts for disinfecting a reusable nebulizer. Children's Wisconsin's teaching sheet names one as an option for several of the devices it covers, and Cystic Fibrosis Canada's physiotherapy sheet lists it too, if the equipment maker allows it. Several of the traps further down come back to that clause.
What the clinics say, and what a study found
All three sheets put a wash with soap and water before any disinfecting. A sterilizer only does the disinfecting. It has no scrubbing action, as a long-time Wabi owner in a thread about bottle sterilizers puts it, so the wash at the sink still happens.
A 2013 study in the Journal of Cystic Fibrosis backs the sheets up. The team loaded home nebulizers with the bacteria CF clinics worry about, ran them through three baby-bottle steam sterilizers, and recovered no live bacteria from any site under any of the conditions they tested. The authors add that more studies are needed to confirm the result outside the lab.
Which kind of sterilizer people buy
The kind the threads keep naming is an electric steam sterilizer with a drying cycle, the countertop sort sold for baby bottles and pump parts, pressed into service as a sterilizer for nebulizer parts.
The threads' favourite is Wabi. Of the same kind on Amazon, Papablic's bottle sterilizer and dryer is the one an owner fits ten PARI cups into, with careful loading. They load it while they eat dinner, and it's ready by the time they want to neb.
Both makers do something for CF families. Wabi has a discount for verified CF patients with a doctor's note, in the lower 48 states. Papablic has a donation program for babies with CF and their families.
One person in a thread about microwave sterilizers says to get a sterilizer with a dry cycle, because there's no water to dump afterwards. In another thread, a household that puts its nebulizer parts through a Baby Brezza uses it for the drying feature.
A family with toddlers in the microwave thread switched to a steam sterilizer after cups laid out on the kitchen counter kept picking up contamination. Still, whether a dry cycle is any safer than leaving parts out to air dry is an open question in what we read, so count it as a convenience.
The person who wanted the dry cycle steers people away from UV sterilizers: a nebulizer has too many nooks for the light to reach, in their view.
What melts, and what shouldn't go in
The threads are where the traps live, and most of them are about plastic that can't take the heat.
- An Acapella. A thread titled "Steam sterilizer melted my Acapella and spacer" has one reply whose old opaque Acapella went the same way, while the newer clear version survives a Baby Brezza every day. Another reply says the Acapella's own instructions rule out a sterilizer outright, which is the safer reading. A third switched to an Aerobika, which can go in.
- A spacer. The Baby Brezza household keeps theirs out of the sterilizer because it comes out melted and warped.
- The hospital's disposable cups. The nebulizer cups a hospital hands out are made to be thrown away, and one person found they don't hold up in a bottle sterilizer or in boiling water. They got a prescription for a reusable PARI cup instead.
- Mesh and eFlow nebulizers. Medication cups and mesh pieces can need different care. The eFlow family is where owners split. One person's eFlow Rapid can't go in and gets boiled, while another's team advised the steriliser for theirs. Children's Wisconsin's sheet says all six pieces of the eFlow handset can be disinfected in an electric steam sterilizer. The manual that came with yours settles it, and your team can read it with you.
What about microwave steam bags?
Microwave bags are the cheap alternative the threads mention, but the sheets steer away from them. Children's Wisconsin says not to use a microwave sterilizer for most of the devices it covers. The Foundation rules the microwave out for an eFlow, Altera or eRapid.
The family with toddlers used a microwave sanitizer before their switch. It melts cups other than PARI's, they found, and their clinic warned them about cold spots. They admit they don't know whether it fully sanitizes.
The bags also aren't for a nebulizer with a metal mesh head. An electric steamer is the kind all three sheets name.
The one thing steam doesn't do better
The sterilizer is an upgrade for your evening, but it's no kinder to the cups than the pot was. A 2018 study put PARI LC Plus nebulizers through sixty cleaning cycles. Heat, whether boiling or a baby-bottle steam sterilizer, lowered the nebulizer's output, and the steamer lowered it more.
The authors add that nebulizers made from other plastics or metals may behave differently. So budget for cups to wear out the way they already do, if not a touch sooner.
Before you order one, check two things. Find the cleaning page in your nebulizer's manual and make sure steam is on it, since two of the three sheets defer to the maker and so do we.
Then raise it with your CF team. The family with toddlers got theirs prescribed as medical equipment and covered, in Michigan. With the manual and the team on board, Papablic's bottle sterilizer and dryer is the kind the clinic sheets point at, and the pot can go back in the cupboard.
