"The assumption has been that if you tried this on an N95 mask they would degrade rapidly. We thought we’d give it a try anyway," Kumar said.
"And actually what we found is while it does degrade some [types of] masks, there’s a certain group of masks that are made of kind of a fabric-type material, rather than being moulded closely to the face… they’re called pleated [masks]," he said. Kumar said the pleated fabric masks can be cycled through an autoclaving machine 10 times and come out as good as before.
"The reason this is really important is that autoclaves are available at literally every established hospital in the world. There is probably no hospital in the world that doesn’t have an autoclave machine," Kumar said.
A group of Manitoba researchers say they’ve found a way to safely decontaminate and reuse medical masks that are normally thrown away after each use.