Decontamination and re-use of N95 and surgical masks
by
Prof.Arnab Bhattacharya(DCMP&MS, TIFR, Mumbai)
→
Asia/Kolkata
https://zoom.us/j/91427966752 (Online)
https://zoom.us/j/91427966752
Online
Description
The COVID-19 pandemic has spontaneously brought together researchers across the world enabling unique scientific collaborations. The scarcity of N95 masks for health-care workers spurred efforts to decontaminate and re-use such masks. A simple low-cost setup to measure the particle filtration efficiency of different masks has helped us evaluate several heat-based decontamination strategies, especially for low-resources. Based on protocols developed at TIFR a heat-based decontamination setup has been deployed at Tata Memorial Hospital, allowing the re-use of several thousands of N95 masks. Apart from this, I would highlight several interesting observations on mask filtration efficiencies that are relevant especially in a market flooded with many variants of masks, making different claims to their efficiency, re-usability etc.
