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COVID-19: You can now effectively disinfect your N95 face mask while taking a coffee break

COVID-19: You can now effectively disinfect your N95 face mask while taking a coffee break
Higher humidity and heat substantially reduced the amount of virus the team could detect on the mask.

Heat and humidity is all that is required to effective disinfect your N95 face mask without causing any damage to it. Read on to know more.

Written by Jahnavi Sarma |Updated : September 28, 2020 9:01 AM IST

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers have been trying to find the best possible way to disinfect and reuse face masks, especially the N95. The need for this was first recognised during the initial days of the pandemic when the world faced an acute shortage of these masks because of panic buying and unscrupulous hoarders. Many scientists have come up with different methods. But there is always some degradation in the filtration capacity of the N95 masks.

Now according to a new study at the Stanford University in the US, you can quickly disinfect your N95 face mask in just a short time. Using a combination of moderate heat and high relative humidity, researchers were able to disinfect N95 mask materials without hampering their ability to filter out viruses, including COVID-19.The ability to decontaminate several of these masks while doctors are having a coffee break will lessen the chance that masks contaminated with COVID viruses would expose other patients.

New method will not degrade filter capacity

According to the study, published in the journal ACS Nano, facing a shortage of the masks early this year, researchers considered a number of ways to disinfect them for reuse, including ultraviolet light, hydrogen peroxide vapours, autoclaves and chemical disinfectants. The problem is that many of these methods degrade the N95 masks' filtering abilities so that at most they could be reused a few times. In the new study, the research team focused their attention on a combination of heat and humidity to try to decontaminate masks.

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85 degrees Celsius with 100 per cent relative humidity will do the trick

The team first mixed up batches of SARS-CoV-2 virus in liquids designed to mimic the fluids that might spray out of our mouths when we cough, sneeze, sing or simply breathe. They next sprayed droplets of the brew on a piece of melt-blown fabric, a material used in most N95 masks, and let it dry. Finally, they heated their samples at temperatures ranging from 25 to 95 degrees Celsius for up to 30 minutes with relative humidity up to 100 per cent. Higher humidity and heat substantially reduced the amount of virus the team could detect on the face mask, although they had to be careful not to go too hot, which additional tests revealed could lower the material's ability to filter out virus-carrying droplets. The sweet spot appeared to be 85 degrees Celsius with 100 per cent relative humidity - the team could find no trace of SARS-CoV-2 after cooking the masks under those conditions.

You can now reuse the mask more than 20 times

Additional results indicate masks could be decontaminated and reused upwards of 20 times and that the process works on at least two other viruses. Researchers have known for a long time that heat and humidity are good ways to inactivate viruses - there hadn't been an urgent need for a detailed quantitative analysis of something like mask decontamination until now. They are hopeful that the new data provide some quantitative guidance for the future.

(With inputs from IANS)