UV decontamination of personal protective equipment with idle laboratory biosafety cabinets during the COVID-19 pandemic
Name
journal.pone.0241734.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.19 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
172483497caa04fdd90237fd0f2ecd97
Author(s)
Weaver, Davis T.
McElvany, Benjamin D.
Gopalakrishnan, Vishhvaan
Card, Kyle J.
Crozier, Dena
Dhawan, Andrew
Dinh, Mina N.
Dolson, Emily
Farrokhian, Nathan
Hitomi, Masahiro
Date Issued
July 2021
Journal
PLOS ONE
Publisher
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Citation
Weaver Davis T. et al. "UV decontamination of personal protective equipment with idle laboratory biosafety
cabinets during the COVID-19 pandemic." PLoS ONE 16, 7 (July 2021): e0241734. © 2021 Weaver et al.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Personal protective equipment (PPE) is crucially important to the safety of both patients and medical personnel, particularly in the event of an infectious pandemic. As the incidence of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) increases exponentially in the United States and many parts of the world, healthcare provider demand for these necessities is currently outpacing supply. In the midst of the current pandemic, there has been a concerted effort to identify viable ways to conserve PPE, including decontamination after use. In this study, we outline a procedure by which PPE may be decontaminated using ultraviolet (UV) radiation in biosafety cabinets (BSCs), a common element of many academic, public health, and hospital laboratories. According to the literature, effective decontamination of N95 respirator masks or surgical masks requires UV-C doses of greater than 1 Jcm⁻², which was achieved after 4.3 hours per side when placing the N95 at the bottom of the BSCs tested in this study. We then demonstrated complete inactivation of the human coronavirus NL63 on N95 mask material after 15 minutes of UV-C exposure at 61 cm (232 μWcm⁻²). Our results provide support to healthcare organizations looking for methods to extend their reserves of PPE.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0241734
