An efficient UV-C device for photoinactivation of human Corona and Influenza virus: Solution for small-scale reuse of personal protective equipment (PPE)

The world has recently witnessed a significant surge in the use of non-recyclable items such as Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This has increased environmental pollution and caused a massive burden on the global waste management system. Hence, an effective strategy to address the demand-supply disparity and provide road map for sustainable management of used PPE are the need of the hour. In the present work, we aimed to develop a cost-effective, convenient, and effective strategy to safely reuse PPE by engineering an in-house UV-C-based Sanitization Device (UVSD) and systematically evaluating its potential to disinfect virus-contaminated PPE. To this end, we tested the capacity of the UVSD to disinfect single-use PPE and N95 face masks, experimentally soiled with the human Influenza (A/PR/8/1934/H1N1) and human Coronavirus (HCoV-OC43). For this, the UV-C-based photoinactivation of both viruses was assessed by in vitro cell protection, quantification of viral gene transcript, and residual viral load by plaque-forming assay. Further, Indirect immunofluorescence and viral hemagglutination assays were also performed to visualize and quantify the viral titers at different post-exposure (UV-C) time points. Our results demonstrate that 15 min exposure to the virus-contaminated simple or complex PPE within the UVSD cabinet could effectively inactivate both the H1N1 and HCoV-OC43 viruses.