Comparison of the Filter Efficiency of Medical Nonwoven Fabrics against Three Different Microbe Aerosols.

In this study, we used three different microbial aerosols of phi-X174 phage, influenza virus, and S. aureus and tested the filter efficiency by capturing microbial aerosols for two medical nonwoven fabrics. We compared the filter efficiency against each airborne microbe to analyze the dependency of filter efficiency on the microbial particle size. Our results showed that against the three types of spherical microbe particles, the filter efficiencies against influenza virus particles were the lowest and those against phi-X174 phages were the highest for both types of nonwoven fabrics. The experimental results mostly corresponded with theoretical calculations. We conclude that the filter efficiency test using the phi-X174 phage aerosol may overestimate the protective performance of nonwoven fabrics with filter structure compared to that against real pathogens such as the influenza virus. PMID: 29910210 [PubMed - in process]
Source: Biocontrol Science - Category: Microbiology Tags: Biocontrol Sci Source Type: research