This story was updated on July 22 to explain the timing of Battelle’s decontamination technology studies.
A hangar near El Paso International Airport comprises metal boxes of 20-foot aircraft, staff entering and leaving the boxes, dressed in a full protective apparatus in a scene reminiscent of a high-containment lab.
Inside the boxes, piles of N95 medical masks rest on stainless metal shelves or hang from rods as enthusiasts blow, aerating them for hours after sitting in a mist of hydrogen peroxide.
The site is one of 45 deployed across the United States by the Ohio-based nonprofit Battelle Memorial Institute, which has developed a technology for decontaminating medical-grade masks so they can be reused.
To date, the company claims to have sterilized more than 1.4 million masks and offers door-to-door service in medical and correctional facilities, shipping to and from its facilities.
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On Tuesday, the official count of COVID-19 instances in the United States more than 3.8 million and 141,000 deaths compared to Johns Hopkins University. This includes 12,041 cases shown and 187 deaths in El Paso County, compared to more than 17,000 across the state of New Mexico.
As the pandemic continues to escalate in the United States, non-public protective apparatus (PPE) materials for the workers’ medical corps are hardening due to shortage chain of origin and declining federal stocks.
States have sounded the alarm about the scarcity since the pandemic hit the United States, and the situation persists as cases escalate.
The Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has included limited reuse of PPE in crisis as a component of its recommendations for optimizing supplies.
At a press conference on July 9, New Mexico’s Secretary of Social Services David Scrase said that while hospital systems across the state still have PPE supplies for 7 days, they want to decontaminate and reuse the mask of increasing importance to the state’s COVID. 19 response.
That’s where Battelle’s generation comes in, with amenities deployed in Rio Rancho, such as El Paso, which is adjacent to Doa Ana County, New Mexico, where passenger traffic between states has turned southern New Mexico County into a hot spot for COVID-19.
“While scarcity persists, studies support the decontamination of the N95 mask as an effective interim measure,” said Kendra Versendaal, site manager in El Paso.
Battelle uses a generation called the Critical Care Decontamination System (CCDS). Will Richter, a microbiologist and principal investigator in Battelle, said the institute runs under contract with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Defense Logistics Agency to locate its decontamination sets in areas of greatest need and fully fund operations.
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The company says it lasts serves more than 21,000 services and has enough capacity for more as COVID-19 instances accumulate and the maximum capacity of hospitals is under increased pressure.
“This generation was born in 2015, the Ebola outbreak,” said Kendra Versendaal, site manager in El Paso. “The government asked, if there was a global pandemic and a shortage of PPE, could we decontaminate these materials? Battelle did these studies and decided it could be done.”
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The institute had reveled in hydrogen peroxide in the steam phase to decontaminate the device from its laboratories.
“We had a lot of fun with him, either in terms of his ability to kill microorganisms (and) also in his history of protection and compatibility with other materials,” Richter said.
Battelle’s procedure has been effectively tested on more than 25 N95 masks, and the procedure also appears to be effective on facial screens, Richter said.
3M, an N95 mask manufacturer, conducted its own review of Battelle’s decontamination as a component of the FDA approval process, giving Batelle a “success” score for filtration power testing as well as adjustment.
Hospitals, correctional centers, dental offices, and other sites can register for online service www.battelle.org/decon. All service, in addition to shipping costs, is provided free of charge and paid through the federal government.
Each obtains a separate identity code when registering and submissions are tracked so that institutions get the same mask they send for decontamination.
The barcode formula also allows you to identify the individual mask through the department, the floor and even the individual user, so that workers can get their own mask.
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Battelle staff, wearing full protective clothing, mask the double bag shipping fabrics and place them on the shelves and racks of the decontamination unit.
The unit is then sealed and the turbines inject maximum concentrations of hydrogen peroxide.
“It generates a fog inside the chamber, much like you’d see on your bathroom mirror in the morning when you’re getting (out of the) shower,” Richter said.
After sitting in the steam, a fan sucks the ambient air through the chamber and through a series of HEPA filters, which is then evacuated from the rear. This aeration process, which hydrogen peroxide from the chamber and masks, takes several hours.
“Often, this procedure takes about 3 days between them and us and vice versa,” Versendaal said.
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Richter said each test can decontaminate up to 5,000 masks, however, the El Paso unit is not yet in full capacity, having cleaned a total of 4,700 masks by mid-July.
Last week, verseaal said: “The site of El Paso won the most boxes in a day without getting married since it opened. We are able to respond to any increase in the call that may be caused by existing outbreaks. coronavirus cases in Texas. already national level.”
The Federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s legal exposure restriction for oxide-consistent hydrogen is a component consistent with one million for an average of 8 hours. In other words, this is the maximum intended for a user exposed on average 8 hours a day, consistent with the 40-hour week.
For security, Richter said Battelle sets the maximum point to 0.8 ppm. Once the concentration in the chamber decreases to this point, start measuring the concentrations in individual masks.
He also said that internal studies recommended that in a day or two, with much of this passage while the mask is refurbished and sent to its original establishments, there is no detectable concentration.
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The procedure is the subject of a two-year review funded by the Food and Drug Administration that showed that the procedure kills several microbes, and the following tests of its effectiveness are opposed to sarS-CoV-2 coronavirus causing COVID-19 disease.
Richter said a 2016 exam that measures how the mask can be recycled and filters air waste, while allowing the user to breathe, found that the filters can contain up to 50 cycles, but that the belts would lose their elasticity between 20 and 30 cycles.
According to this research, Battelle uses 20 as the number of times a mask can be decontaminated and reused.
The CCDS formula obtained emergency FDA approval in March, and Richter said the company was reviewing a similar authorization for the decontamination of facial protectors.
Until the source chain produced a sufficiently good source of new equipment, Richter stated that Battelle was offering his solution to fitness service providers while recommending that networks purchase supplies.
“We don’t know what the fall will bring, and we all adapt on the fly,” he said.
You can contact Algernon D’Ammassa at 575-541-5451, [email protected] or @AlgernonWrites on Twitter.