COVID-19 in the Laundry

LYNNE SEHULSTER, PhD, M(ASCP) speaks with ALM Executive Director Linda Fairbanks to clear up some concerns and misconceptions about COVID-19 in laundry facilities. Please visit ALM's COVID-19 page for continually updated information for the textile care industry.

Lynne Sehulster has been with the CDC for almost 20 years, working as a Health Scientist in the Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion (DHQP) within the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases (NCEZID). Prior to her coming to CDC, she served as an infectious disease epidemiologist for 15 years at the Texas Department of Health (currently known as the Texas Department of State Health Services). Her current area of expertise focuses on environmental infection control, microbial inactivation, and transmission of infectious diseases. She has advised CDC and other federal and state health agencies, healthcare professionals, and the public on issues concerning environmental cleaning, sterilization and disinfection, healthcare laundry issues, prion disease epidemiology, and environmental management of emerging diseases. She is the coordinator of and contributor to the CDC/HICPAC “Guidelines for Environmental Infection Control in Health-Care Facilities” that was released in 2003, and has assisted federal colleagues and other entities in the development of their infection prevention guidelines.

She received her PhD and MS in Microbiology from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, completed a postdoctoral appointment in viral immunology at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston TX, and has her certificate as a Microbiologist with the American Society of Clinical Pathologists (M[ASCP]). She also serves as an Editorial Board member for the journals Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology and Applied and Environmental Microbiology.