Can N95 respirators be effectively decontaminated more than 25 times? – Innovation Toronto

N95 respirators are commonly used in hospitals worldwide to protect healthcare personnel from infectious pathogens. During the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare facilities have experienced shortages of the respirators, forcing personnel to re-use them or resort to less protective masking alternatives.

“The findings from our study expand upon previous findings and show that VHP is a relatively safe method for reprocessing N95 respirators and could help address shortages in future epidemics,” said lead author Christina F. Yen, MD, who was a fellow in medicine at BIDMC during the research and is now at the University of Texas, Southwestern. “It is important that we now find ways to scale and translate this disinfection capability to smaller hospitals and resource-limited healthcare settings that could benefit just as much – perhaps more – from this type of personal protective equipment reprocessing in future disaster scenarios.”

Yen and colleagues conducted a series of qualitative and quantitative tests to evaluate both the function and effectiveness of seven N95 respirators that were used by three male and four female volunteers from June to August of 2020. These tests comprised a user seal check (performed by subjects donning and doffing the respirators), qualitative and quantitative respirator fit testing, and filtration efficiency testing, which assesses the ability of the respirator to filter out particles.

Even after 25 decontamination cycles, the researchers found no changes in respiratory integrity or filtration efficiency among the seven N95 respirators. All seven N95 respirators met the primary endpoints of function and effectiveness, passing 25 user seal checks and eight quantitative and four qualitative fit tests, in addition to maintaining filtration efficiencies of 95 percent or above throughout the study.

“We have proven that VPHP is effective at decontaminating N95 respirator masks up to 20 times at large scale,” said Matt Vaughan, president of contract research at Battelle. The masks are exposed to …