Ovine skeletal muscle was used as a model wound and inoculated with airborne bacteria collected from a busy communal room. A specialized counting technique involving agar overlay and post-incubation tetrazolium staining was developed to allow accurate counting of small numbers of bacteria on the surfaces of muscle and membrane filters coated with substantial quantities of muscle and fat debris. Two techniques of recovering the inoculated airborne bacteria from the model wound were compared. Pulsed jet lavage with membrane filtration of the recovered fluid showed substantially better recovery, less variability and correlated more closely with controls than a tetrazolium stained 5 microns membrane filter imprint technique. Pulsed jet lavage with membrane filtration is likely to be the more appropriate technique in the assessment of contamination of wounds created in ultraclean air.