ArticleRevista espanola de salud publica2025
[Bacterial filtration efficiency (BFE) of surgical masks used for eight hours and unused masks with Staphylococcus aureus].
Article in Revista espanola de salud publica, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectiveSpanish regulations and World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines recommend not using surgical masks for more than four hours. The high demand and low availability of surgical masks during the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted this as a major limitation. The objective of this study was to compare the bacterial filtration efficiency (BFE) between used surgical masks (eight hours) and unused masks (zero hours).
methods208 surgical masks worn for eight hours in a row were studied. They were placed on a culture plate containing blood agar (Agar Columbia with sheep blood plus, Thermo Scientific) and sprayed a suspension of Staphylococcus aureus (ATCC 29313) at a distance of thirty centimeters. Culture plates were incubated at 37 °C for twenty-four hours. A count of colony forming units (CFU) was carried out. As a control for BFE, new non-worn masks were included. A t-test and a z-test were used at a 95% confidence level to compare the means of the two groups.
resultsTo establish the BFE, the CFU of the cultures from the used masks were compared with the control cultures without a mask. Likewise, the BFE of used masks was compared to that of new masks. The mean, median and mode values of the BFE of both masks, used and new ones, were greater than 99%. No statistically significant differences were detected between eight hours used masks and not used ones (zero hours).
conclusionsSurgical masks maintain a BFE equivalent to that new, unused surgical masks at eight hours.
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40525453PMC12172150What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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