COVID-19 global pandemic planning: Performance and electret charge of N95 respirators after recommended decontamination methods.

ABSTRACT: Shortages of N95 respirators for use by medical personnel have driven consideration of novel conservation strategies, including decontamination for reuse and extended use. Decontamination methods listed as promising by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (vaporous hydrogen peroxide (VHP), wet heat, ultraviolet irradiation (UVI)) and several methods considered for low resource environments (bleach, isopropyl alcohol and detergent/soap) were studied for two commonly used surgical N95 respirators (3M™ 1860 and 1870+ Aura™). Although N95 filtration performance depends on the electrostatically charged electret filtration layer, the impact of decontamination on this layer is largely unexplored. As such, respirator performance following decontamination was assessed based on the f

SUBMITTER: Grillet AM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7961645 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature