ANN ARBOR, MI — Hospitals across the country are now accepting donations of face masks to protect its front-line healthcare workers. Some hospitals, however, may need to reuse those masks due to a shortage around the world, and that means they need to be decontaminated.
Helping create those guidelines are some 60 scientists, engineers, students and clinicians from universities and the private sector who are members of N95DECON, and two of those professors are Kevin Fu and Nancy Love at the University of Michigan.
N95DECON is a national volunteer effort that has developed guidance for hospitals that need to decontaminate face masks for health care workers. Nicole Casal Moore, spokesperson for UM’s College of Engineering, said the group has been working on the effort for a couple weeks, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released new mask decontamination guidelines that align with N95DECON’s rules.
“Great minds think alike,” said Fu, a professor of computer science and engineering at UM.
Fu is one of the organizers of the group, which he said includes nearly a dozen universities and companies. He previously worked as a visiting fellow at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and Fu has experience reviewing FDA regulatory processes for the National Academy of Medicine, making him an essential part of the N95DECON team.
In normal times, Fu said, standard care would advise throwing out a mask after each patient encounter for safety. But, with a shortage of masks around the world, things have changed.
“Our work examines the problems of how to decontaminate reused masks when there is no supply of fresh masks,” Fu said.
The CDC guidelines say to N95 respirators should be discarded after being used in aerosol-generating procedures, if they are contaminated with blood, respiratory or nasal secretions or other bodily fluids from patients, and if they follow close contact with any patient with an infectious disease, including COVID-19.
To reuse them, the CDC recommends hanging used respirators in a designated storage area or to keep them in a breathable, clean container like a paper bag between uses. They also say to clean hands with soap and water or an alcohol-based hand sanitizer before touching it and to avoid touching the inside of the respirator.
According to Fu, there’s no one best method for decontamination, and hospitals need to make their own choices based on their unique circumstances and resources.
Love, who is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UM, said she was asked by the College of Engineering to coordinate its response to evaluating N95 mask decontamination methods that would meet Michigan Medicine’s needs and goals in the hospital. She is also co-lead of UM’s environmental biotechnology group with Dr. Krista Wigginton, who studies coronaviruses and how disinfectants kill them.
“There’s research on how coronaviruses behave in fluids, but we don’t know if they behave the same way on masks. It is important for experiments to be conducted to address these knowledge gaps,” Love said in a press release. “And few if any studies are doing all of the above — biological testing, mask particle reduction performance, and human fit testing.”
The N95DECON team launched a website Wednesday with scientific literature about N95 mask decontamination. The study tested three approaches for N95 mask decontamination: Heat and humidity, ultraviolet light and hydrogen peroxide vapor and hydrogen peroxide gas plasma.
Herek Clack and Mirko Gamba are part of a research team at UM that is stress testing masks after treatment. The team ensures the masks can still perform its function after multiple uses, and to do this, they fire an air stream of tiny particles at the mask and measure the percentage that passes through. The American Society for Testing and Materials standard is a penetration rate of no more than 5%.
“And if you look at a mask that’s been treated once, five times and then ten times and you don’t see an increase in penetration, that gives us confidence that the mask really isn’t being degraded by these decontamination processes," Clack said in the release.
At Michigan State University, the Extension Food Processing Innovation Center is partnering with Sparrow Health System on a new method to reuse N95 masks. According to a press release, MSU is the first state university to create a partnership to extend the life of protective masks that typically see just one use.
“The need for personal protection equipment is greatly outweighing the demand. We saw this as a call to action for a university with such a depth and breadth of ability to innovate and a true sense of urgency around doing all we can to support and protect the wonderful people of our state,” said Norman J. Beauchamp Jr., executive vice president for health sciences at MSU. “Turning our efforts toward decontaminating N95 masks is amongst the most significant thing we can do to ensure the health and safety of medical workers, preserving the ability to respond to those needing care.”
Staff at the center are following similar steps that UM and the CDC recommend, which is to heat the masks and kill viruses and bacteria, then seal them in individual bags to decontaminate for three days before being returned. The release said a test run confirmed the process was successful before any masks were given to healthcare workers.
MSU Extension Director Jeff Dwyer said in the release that staff are developing protocols that can be replicated by others who have commercial-scale spiral ovens. They are also using FDA-approved formulas to create sanitizer that can be used on non-surgical hard surfaces in medical facilities.
“We are all in this outbreak response together – university, state, country, world,” Dwyer said in the release. “This is just another way Spartans are stepping up to make a difference.”
Read all of MLive’s coverage on the coronavirus at mlive.com/coronavirus.
Additional information is available at Michigan.gov/Coronavirus and CDC.gov/Coronavirus.
PREVENTION TIPS
In addition to washing hands regularly and not touching your face, officials recommend practicing social distancing, assuming anyone may be carrying the virus.
Health officials say you should be staying at least 6 feet away from others and working from home, if possible.
Carry hand sanitizer with you, and use disinfecting wipes or disinfecting spray cleaners on frequently-touched surfaces in your home (door handles, faucets, countertops) and when you go into places like stores.
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