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April 2, 2020 10:30 pm

Hospital Autoclaves May Allow Safe Reuse of N95 Masks

Freshly Exhumed shares a report from CBC.ca: "[Autoclaving] is like a pressure cooker -- basically you enclose items into a chamber, you lock down the chamber, you heat it up and actually increase the pressure inside the chamber," Dr. Anand Kumar, a professor of medicine at the University of Manitoba, said. The machines heat up to about 121 C for 15 minutes, killing bacteria and viruses. "It'll sterilize anything." The assumption has been that if you tried this on an N95 mask they would degrade rapidly. We thought we'd give it a try anyway," Kumar said. "And actually what we found is while it does degrade some [types of] masks, there's a certain group of masks that are made of kind of a fabric-type material, rather than being moulded closely to the face they're called pleated [masks]," he said. Kumar said the pleated fabric masks can be cycled through an autoclaving machine 10 times and come out as good as before. "The reason this is really important is that autoclaves are available at literally every established hospital in the world. There is probably no hospital in the world that doesn't have an autoclave machine," Kumar said. "So everybody can use this for these particular types of masks and these particular types of masks are probably the most common type of N95 mask, so we're really pleased." Kumar said the technique could be put into use at any hospital at any time. "It's a technology that's available and ready to go right now."

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