Patients' safety and haemodialysis devices.

Chronic and acute extracorporeal detoxification treatments, such as haemodialysis, haemofiltration, haemodiafiltration or haemoperfusion, clearly have become parts of the standard armamentarium of modern medicine. The necessary technical equipment has been transformed in the course of the last decades from prototype-like monsters (which nobody dared to touch without thorough education) to handy, nicely designed and reliably working commercial products that are produced in large quantities by the medical industry. It has been estimated that in 1999 the worldwide inventory was more than 280 000 dialysis machines with about 40 000 new devices entering this market in 1999 alone. Given these numbers it is certainly justified to qualify the use of extracorporeal detoxification technology as a ‘routine procedure’.