ENVI RONMENTAL DECONTAMINAT ION
Decontamination in the COVID era
Tautvydas Karitonas discusses the critical challenges for healthcare sectors that arose as a result of the pandemic – from reprocessing of PPE to environmental decontamination.
Since the first case of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) emerged in China, many millions of people have been infected in countries as distant as the United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, India and the Russian Federation, exemplifying the global nature of this pandemic. The rapid increase in cases had led to major challenges for the health sectors globally including shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) supplies, emergence of co-infections in COVID-19 positive patients, and the increased use of biocides to constantly clean surfaces and equipment – which may degrade these surfaces and form surface fractures and cracks allowing them to be re-contaminated.
PPE decontamination using HPV and UV-C light
PPE for healthcare workers is a key component of infection prevention and control; ensuring that healthcare workers are protected means more effective containment for all. However, a major demand shock triggered by healthcare system needs, as well as panicked marketplace behaviour, depleted PPE inventories and that led to major disruptions to the PPE global supply chain, therefore causing a sharp reduction in PPE exported to the UK and the US, which were already highly dependent on internationally-sourced PPE.
The increased demand for PPE led global authorities to re-think their strategies and propose new solutions. One of these solutions is to decontaminate (recycle) PPE for reuse by exposing the equipment to different types of automated high-tech disinfection technologies such as hydrogen peroxide vapour (HPV) and ultraviolet-C (UV- C) light. These technologies are being used in addition to different forms of cleaning to decontaminate the environment including air, surfaces and water. UV-C and HPV technologies have shown promising activities in decontaminating FFP3, N95 masks, gowns and other materials as evident in the literature. One paper1
provided
an overview of three systematic reviews on the decontamination of FFP3 masks using different methods. The authors found that HPV and UV germicidal irradiation are very effective at eliminating pathogens including severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) from FFP3 masks without significantly influencing appearance, integrity and function of these masks.
It is vital to make sure that surfaces are compatible with the chemical products being used to ensure minimum surface damage.
MAY 2021
Another study2
provided an overview
of 55 papers that determined the most used decontamination methods of N95 respirators. The authors concluded that hydrogen peroxide vapour and UV light are the most commonly cited interventions that successfully decontaminated N95 masks without affecting masks’ performance and integrity. However, the number of cycles at which fit and integrity remained unaffected were not specified. In addition, another research paper3
reported the use of hydrogen peroxide vapour to decontaminate N95 respirators. All respirators were hung on metal racks, stacked in piles, and were placed individually in paper bags or covered with make-up or moisturiser. It was found that hydrogen peroxide vapour successfully decontaminated the masks after 90 minutes when placed in different compartments at a concentration that varied between 400-800 ppm. The researchers stated that stacking reduced the time needed to arrange N95 respirators for decontamination by approximately two-thirds while almost tripling facility capacity. Make-up and moisturiser creams did not interfere with the decontamination process.
However, these findings should be
further investigated to ensure that make- up and moisturisers do not influence the
WWW.CLINICALSERVICESJOURNAL.COM l 57
▲
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80
