Contributions to this post were provided by former CCC Council Member Kevin Fu from the University of Michigan.
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused staggering resource shortages around the world. A lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) is forcing medical centers and first responders to reuse N95 masks. Targeting the scarcity of N95 masks for healthcare workers, former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member, Kevin Fu has joined the effort to address this global issue of PPE shortage. Fu is co-PI of the NSF Frontiers Trustworthy Health and Wellness project, founder and chief scientist of the Archimedes Center for Medical Device Security, and Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of Michigan.
The recently released U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Crisis Standards of Care Recommendations for N95 Decontamination document states that although the decontamination and reuse of facepiece respirators are not approved, medical professionals need to consider this as an option and be prepared. They stressed the fact that there is very little research concerning the decontamination of face masks at the moment and provided an overview of methods they saw to be most promising. Left with very little information, medical centers are forced to make their own decision on how to decontaminate their N95 masks.
Fu is a co-organizer of N95DECON, a volunteer-based organization made up of esteemed scientists, engineers, clinicians, and students seeking to provide information and develop guidance for medical facilities that need to decontaminate face masks for reuse by healthcare workers. Fu explains that the group’s overarching mission is to provide a rigorous scientific assessment of decontaminating N95 masks for reuse by healthcare professionals during this crisis shortage.
The N95DECON team includes nearly a dozen universities and companies including Stanford, UC San Francisco, the University of Chicago, Harvard, UC Berkeley, MIT, Georgetown, Seattle University, University of Utah, and X The Moonshot Company. According to news from MLive, Fu previously worked as a visiting fellow at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and has experience reviewing FDA regulatory processes for the National Academy of Medicine, making him an essential part of the N95DECON team. Fu’s cybersecurity research lab has experience with safety protocols using ethylene oxide to sterilize pacemakers in past contributions to the MyHeartYourHeart.org project to recycle pacemakers for humanitarian reuse in developing countries.
“I think there’s a lot of uncertainty among the healthcare systems on the science behind different decontamination methods…We provide a rigorous scientific assessment to reduce the uncertainty. There is no perfect method. Decision-makers need to make their own choices given their local circumstances and conditions.” – Kevin Fu, the Michigan Engineer News Center
N95DECON synthesized their findings and identified three promising options for mask decontamination and the pros and cons of each. The three methods involve heat and humidity, ultraviolet C, and treatment with hydrogen peroxide vapor.
Fu says that serving on the CCC helped prepare him for his role on N95DECON. Describing the team as spanning from medicine to material science to computer science and engineering, Fu explains, “Everyone is focused on the mission to assist the healthcare heroes, beyond seeking traditional academic publishing credit.”
Read the full publications on their website.
At the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) we know that everyone is dealing with a lot in these unprecedented times. We are continuing to work on behalf of the computing research community to catalyze research, but we also want to provide ways to help the community. This blog is from a series of posts about ways computing researchers are using computing to adapt and help in these times. We hope you find something that may help you, either now or in the future.
