Anand Kumar, Samantha B Kasloff, Anders Leung, Todd Cutts, James E Strong, Kevin Hills, Frank X Gu, Paul Chen, Gloria Vazquez-Grande, Barret Rush, Sylvain Lother, Kimberly Malo, Ryan Zarychanski, Jay Krishnan
The response to the COVID-19 epidemic is generating severe shortages of personal protective equipment around the world. In particular, the supply of N95 respirator masks has become severely depleted, with supplies having to be rationed and health care workers having to use masks for prolonged periods in many countries. We sought to test the ability of 7 different decontamination methods: autoclave treatment, ethylene oxide gassing (ETO), low temperature hydrogen peroxide gas plasma (LT-HPGP) treatment, vaporous hydrogen peroxide (VHP) exposure, peracetic acid dry fogging (PAF), ultraviolet C irradiation (UVCI) and moist heat (MH) treatment to decontaminate a variety of different N95 masks following experimental contamination with SARS-CoV-2 or vesicular stomatitis virus as a surrogate...
2020: PloS One