Electric Cookers Clean Face Masks Better Than UV Light, Study Finds

After months of living with the COVID-19 pandemic, people have come to a common sense of wearing a mask when they’re in public places. While many choose to wear single-use masks, others wear cloth and reusable masks, which require cleaning and disinfecting before you can reuse them.

According to scientists, pathogens can live up to 12 hours on the mask. With that in mind, the Society of American Gastrointestinal Endoscopic Surgeon has come up with strategies to help you clean your masks properly. But researchers from the University of Illinois have found something more interesting.

A new study details an alternative method for decontaminating that can be applied on a face mask during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study suggests that you can effectively decontaminate an N95 mask by dry-heating it in the electric cooker for 50 minutes. This method is applicable for rice cookers too.

As the coronavirus outbreak is still very serious in several countries, healthcare workers face a lack of supplies like N95 masks and surgical masks. More than ever, they need the masks to be able to take care of infected patients and protecting the rest of us.

Thanh Nguyen and Vishal Verma thought about developing a new decontamination method that doesn’t require preparation and involves easily accessible components. The new method must be easy to access and quick.

They concluded that an electric cooker could meet all those requirements. They started doing experiments and got favorable results in preliminary tests, showing that electric cookers are truly efficient in removing 4 classes of viruses, including a type of coronavirus. Surprisingly, this method works even more efficiently than UV light.

The pair conducted extensive testing, following which Verma confidently says:

“We built a chamber in my aerosol-testing lab specifically to look at the filtration of the N95 respirators, and measured particles going through it. The respirators maintained their filtration capacity of more than 95% and kept their fit, still properly seated on the wearer's face, even after 20 cycles of decontamination in the electric cooker.”

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