Source avec lien : International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(22). 10.3390/ijerph192215353
À la suite de la pandémie de COVID-19, de nombreux nouveaux matériaux et masques sont apparus sur le marché. Pour déterminer leur adéquation, plusieurs normes précisent les propriétés à tester, notamment l’efficacité de filtration bactérienne (BFE), mais aucune ne décrit comment déterminer l’efficacité de filtration virale (VFE), une propriété particulièrement importante en période de pandémie. Par conséquent, nous avons concentré nos recherches sur l’évaluation de la pertinence et de l’efficacité de différents systèmes pour déterminer la VFE.
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many new materials and masks came onto the market. To determine their suitability, several standards specify which properties to test, including bacterial filtration efficiency (BFE), while none describe how to determine viral filtration efficiency (VFE), a property that is particularly important in times of pandemic. Therefore, we focused our research on evaluating the suitability and efficiency of different systems for determining VFE. Here, we evaluated the VFE of 6 mask types (e.g., a surgical mask, a respirator, material for mask production, and cloth masks) with different filtration efficiencies in four experimental setups and compared the results with BFE results. The study included 17 BFE and 22 VFE experiments with 73 and 81 mask samples tested, respectively. We have shown that the masks tested had high VFE (>99% for surgical masks and respirators, ≥98% for material, and 87–97% for cloth masks) and that all experimental setups provided highly reproducible and reliable VFE results (coefficient of variation < 6%). Therefore, the VFE tests described in this study can be integrated into existing standards for mask testing. Lisez l’article