MW & E (or Medical Wire & Equipment) has provided a service to the medical laboratory community, and in particular the microbiologists for more than half a century. In the early years we provided customers with the components to produce their own swabs, or inoculating loops (with nichrome wire – hence the name!). We were pioneers in the development of dipslides and dipspoons (still with us as DipKits), and have always had an interest in providing innovative products to improve and to simplify the process of collecting specimens or samples for testing, and for performing some of these tests as well.

In 1975 MW & E introduced Transwab®, the first complete ready-to-use transport swab kit complete with swab and a tube of semi-solid transport medium.

In 1980 MW & E introduced Virocult®, the first complete system with a medium dedicated to virus isolation.

Since 1995 Transwab® have been CE-marked as Class IIa devices in accordance with the European Medical Devices Directive. This provides assurance to users that devices are safe and fit for their intended purpose.

In 2004 the NCCLS standard M40-A was published, providing criteria for the performance testing of microbiological transport devices. Medical Wire was involved in the development of this standard and had already incorporated its provisions into its quality assurance programme for Transwab® in 2001

For many years MW & E has also been involved with the food and pharmaceutical industries providing convenient methods for monitoring hygiene or sterility. Our Isolation Transwabs® are popular for the easy detection of pathogenic bacteria such as Listeria, and in recent years our new NRS™ Transwabs® have become established as the product of choice for measuring residual contamination, or its absence, on disinfected food processing surfaces.