The Operative Sentence

A reading room for the primary documents behind operating-room safety and surgical fluid waste.

The record

Privacy

We collect nothing about you. The server that answers your request writes a log line, and that is the whole of it.

Some of the people this site is written for are reading it because something has gone wrong at work: a policy they cannot source, an exposure they have not yet reported, a purchase they are being asked to justify. Several of those are things a person might reasonably not want their employer to know they were reading about at half past eleven at night. So this page is short on purpose, and everything on it is a statement about what the site does rather than about what we intend.

What this site does not do

  • No cookies. None are set, by us or by anyone else, so there is no consent banner — there is nothing to consent to.
  • No JavaScript. Not one line executes anywhere on this site. Nothing measures your scrolling, your reading time, your mouse or your device.
  • No analytics. No analytics service of any kind, first-party or third-party, self-hosted or otherwise.
  • No third-party requests at all. Every file your browser fetches to display these pages comes from this domain: the HTML, the one stylesheet, the five self-hosted font files, the favicon. There is no content delivery network, no font service, no tag manager, no advertising, no embedded video, no map, no social widget, no comment system and no tracking pixel.
  • No local storage. Nothing is written to your browser’s storage, because nothing is running that could write it.
  • No account, no login, no newsletter, no form. There is no form on this site to submit. The only interactive elements are links, two of which open your own mail client.
  • No data sold, shared, brokered or traded. There is nothing to sell, and if there were, we would not.

This is checkable and we would rather you checked it than believed it. Open your browser’s developer tools, switch to the network panel, and reload any page here. Every request should be to biodrainmedical.com. If one is not, that is a defect and a correction, and we want to hear about it at corrections@biodrainmedical.com.

What the server records

Asking for a web page means telling a server where to send it. That is not a choice anyone here made; it is how the protocol works. When your browser requests a page, the server that answers writes an ordinary request log line, which is roughly: the requesting IP address, the time, the method and path requested, the status code returned, the number of bytes sent, and the user-agent string and referrer your browser supplied.

That log exists to serve the site and to keep it standing up — to see that pages resolve, to find broken addresses, and to absorb the kind of automated traffic that any domain with an old link profile attracts. It is not joined to anything else, not used to build a profile of anyone, and not used to work out who read what.

The site is a set of static files served from Cloudflare’s Pages platform, so the request logs are generated and held by that host under its own terms rather than by us. We will not pretend to control a retention schedule we do not set. What we control is that nothing is added to it: no analytics layer, no session identifier, no beacon, no enrichment. If the host ever changes, that will be a dated entry in the change log.

If you write to us

Two addresses are published on every page, and both are read by one person. If you write to either, we hold your message the way anybody holds an email: in a mailbox, with your address on it.

  • We use it to answer you, and, if you are reporting an error, to check the error and publish the correction.
  • A published correction names the person who found it only if they ask to be named. The default is that it does not, and the correction is published either way.
  • We do not add you to anything, because there is nothing to be added to. There is no mailing list, no newsletter and no announcement list.
  • We do not forward your message to a manufacturer, a distributor, a waste contractor or anyone else, and we could not usefully do so if we wanted to.
  • There is no automatic deletion schedule for correspondence, and we would rather say so than invent one. Ask us to delete your message and we will.

One honest limit: email is not confidential in transit and we cannot make it so. If you are writing about something sensitive at your own workplace, consider what you would rather not have in writing, and use a personal address rather than one your employer administers.

Links off this site

Outbound links here go to primary documents — the eCFR, an agency, a state code publisher, a journal, an archive — and to nothing else. There are no affiliate links, no sponsored links, no tracking parameters appended to any address, and no links to any other property this publisher operates.

Following one of those links takes you to somebody else’s server, which has its own logging and its own policies that we have no part in and no view of. Several of the documents this site relies on are held only by agencies and archives that log access; that is theirs to describe, not ours.

If any of this changes

It will be a dated entry in the change log and a rewritten page, never a quiet edit. The claim that this site makes no third-party requests is made in the footer of every page, so it has to keep being true of every page, and any addition that would break it is a change to the publication rather than a detail of its implementation.

There is a commercial reason to keep it true as well as a principled one, and it is worth stating rather than leaving implied: a site that publishes nothing and sells nothing has no use for an audience it can measure. What it needs is to be worth citing. Measurement would cost more than it could return.

Questions about any of this go to editor@biodrainmedical.com. How this publication is paid for is set out at Independence and funding.