Tune In to a New Worry?

Massachusetts dentist and musician Lorenzo Lepore had an aha moment after a school band teacher asked how to make a sick student's wind instrument safe to issue to another student. Just sterilize it the same way you do other instruments, Lepore said. When the teacher replied that the school sterilized none of the instruments, Lepore heard opportunity's bugle call. The result: a service he calls MaestroMD.

"Does your wind instrument threaten your health?" reads the pitch at http://www.maestromd.com . "Laboratory studies have proved that dangerous bacteria can survive and grow inside a musical wind instrument." Those studies -- on a small number of instruments -- were commissioned by Lepore's company.

The business is aimed mostly at school systems -- the first to get the treatment (gratis) are the schools in Lepore's hometown of Medford, Mass. -- but worrywart parents can also sign up to have a single flute or trumpet sanitized. The company supplies prepaid shipping boxes to send instruments to a sterilization facility where the items, still in their cases, are infiltrated with ethylene oxide gas, long used to sterilize medical and dental instruments. The average cost is about $50 to $90 per item, though a tuba will cost you $319; the germ-free instruments are shipped back within 10 days.

Play That Again The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention knows of no disease outbreak tied to wind instruments. John Bradley, a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Infectious Diseases, says that even if disease-causing bacteria could survive the usual summer gap between student rentals (which he considers unlikely), the pathogens associated with such illnesses as staph and strep infections, meningitis and tuberculosis aren't likely to do harm if encountered through a wind instrument.

On a Local Note Gaithersburg-based Victor Litz Music Center, which rents about 1,500 band instruments each school year, swabs out its wind instruments during the summer and cleans mouthpieces with a germicide called Sterisol, says assistant manager Robby Rule. "I have high confidence in the instruments," he says.

-- Jennifer Huget