BURNABY, B.C. -- With a worldwide shortage of N95 respirators, a local brewery in Burnaby has introduced new equipment to decontaminate the masks during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The steam-driven chamber pasteurizer was delivered to Steamworks Brewery just days before the COVID-19 outbreak according to Matt Martin, director of sales and marketing for the company.
The pasteurizer was originally for laboratory use to prevent re-fermentation from occurring in beers with high values of sugar.
Amidst the shortage of N95 respirators for front-line health-care workers, CEO of Steamworks Brewing Company Eli Gershkovitch is offering the equipment to the provincial health authority and health authorities in Washington state at no cost.
According to Health Canada, any registered hospital may use the Steamworks pasteurizer for N95 mask decontamination without any further regulatory authorization.
"We're not using it in any way of capacity right now, so we're offering it to anybody in B.C., any facility that would be able to make use of it. We'd love to ship it out to their facility and allow them to use it." said Martin.
Steamworks Brewery has adapted proper protocols developed by Stanford University, which are approved by the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and use steam or hydrogen peroxide vapour.
According to Martin, "It is very easy to use, and our hope is that there's a facility out there that's in need, and can make good use of it.
Gershkovitch said in a news release that steam is used to decontaminate masks faster in greater quantities, but hydrogen peroxide vapour is used for greater reusability.
"With steam, our pasteurizer can decontaminate 1,200 masks per cycle, and approximately 10,000 N95 masks per day. Using steam, each mask can be decontaminated up to three times."
Using hydrogen peroxide vapour, he said they can do about 5,000 masks a day, but they can be decontaminated a maximum of 10 times before needing to be discarded.
When asked when the machine would be returned to Steamworks Brewing Company, Martin said, "We won't want it back until they don't need it anymore. We're fully committed to supplying and lending it out to a facility for certainly the duration of this COVID crisis and allow them to use it for as long as they need."
