Quantitative Fit Evaluation of N95 Filtering Facepiece Respirators and Coronavirus Inactivation Following Heat Treatment
| Autor: | Staci R. Kane, Travis L Massey, Monica K. Borucki, Mihail Bora, Razi-ul Haque, Samuel Y. Paik, Kyle W Fuhrer, Salmaan H. Baxamusa |
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| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
business.product_category
Hot Temperature Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) N95 Respirators Infective Dose coronavirus Economic shortage 02 engineering and technology Radiant heat filtering facepiece respirator fit 03 medical and health sciences Mice Dry heating Occupational Exposure Animals Humans AcademicSubjects/MED00640 Respirator Pandemics 030304 developmental biology Filter material 0303 health sciences SARS-CoV-2 N95 Public Health Environmental and Occupational Health COVID-19 decontamination 021001 nanoscience & nanotechnology Pulp and paper industry Emergency situations reuse mask Environmental science Original Article heat 0210 nano-technology business |
| Zdroj: | Annals of Work Exposures and Health |
| ISSN: | 2398-7316 |
| Popis: | Reuse of filtering facepiece respirators (FFRs, commonly referred to as N95s) normally meant for single use has become common in healthcare facilities due to shortages caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we report that murine hepatitis coronavirus initially seeded on FFR filter material is inactivated (6 order of magnitude reduction as measured by median tissue culture infective dose, TCID50) after dry heating at 75°C for 30 min. We also find that the quantitative fit of FFRs after heat treatment at this temperature, under dry conditions or at 90% relative humidity, is not affected by single or 10 heating cycles. Previous studies have reported that the filtration efficiency of FFRs is not negatively impacted by these heating conditions. These results suggest that thermal inactivation of coronaviruses is a potentially rapid and widely deployable method to reuse N95 FFRs in emergency situations where reusing FFRs is a necessity and broad-spectrum sterilization is unavailable. However, we also observe that a radiative heat source (e.g. an exposed heating element) results in rapid qualitative degradation of the FFR. Finally, we discuss differences in the results reported here and other recent studies investigating heat as a means to recycle FFRs. These differences suggest that while our repeated decontamination cycles do not affect FFR fit, overall wear time and the number of donning/doffing cycles are important factors that likely degrade FFR fit and must be investigated further. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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