If the used N95 mask is left alone and exposed to air for 96 hours, it will get decontaminated. If a person had five masks to use, and used a different one each day, then by the sixth day, the mask used on day one will be decontaminated. As Prof. Pramesh explains, in TMH, they use a combination of the two approaches for best results. “To date over 6,500 N95 masks have been decontaminated using this method at our hospital. Not only has this resulted in a huge saving, the integrity and reliability of the masks are not compromised,” says Prof. Pramesh. Before using the masks, the group ascertained that the right temperature and right duration of heating eliminated the viral load, and the mask was decontaminated and its integrity intact.
The TIFR group also tests the masks beforehand to make sure that they indeed qualify to be called N95. As Prof. Pramesh explains, “This is because as the pandemic grew in impact, we needed many more masks than our usual suppliers could provide. We had to purchase them from new manufacturers and needed to check the quality.” This has two aspects – checking the filtration capacity and also the fit, and the TIFR team obliged.
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Unknown titleumidity anyway,” says Prof. Bhattacharya. “We have checked that the filtration efficiency of various masks is not impacted over five such one-hour decontamination cycles.” Time, a decontaminant <span>If the used N95 mask is left alone and exposed to air for 96 hours, it will get decontaminated. If a person had five masks to use, and used a different one each day, then by the sixth day, the mask used on day one will be decontaminated. As Prof. Pramesh explains, in TMH, they use a combination of the two approaches for best results. “To date over 6,500 N95 masks have been decontaminated using this method at our hospital. Not only has this resulted in a huge saving, the integrity and reliability of the masks are not compromised,” says Prof. Pramesh. Before using the masks, the group ascertained that the right temperature and right duration of heating eliminated the viral load, and the mask was decontaminated and its integrity intact. The TIFR group also tests the masks beforehand to make sure that they indeed qualify to be called N95. As Prof. Pramesh explains, “This is because as the pandemic grew in impact, we needed many more masks than our usual suppliers could provide. We had to purchase them from new manufacturers and needed to check the quality.” This has two aspects – checking the filtration capacity and also the fit, and the TIFR team obliged. Low-cost solution In fact, Prof. Bhattacharya and coworkers have developed, in collaboration with Manu Prakash’s team from Stanford, a low-cost method of decontamination of the masks th Summary
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