Amid mounting concerns over the shortage of personal protective equipment for front-line workers fighting the spread of COVID-19, an Ontario resident has designed what he says could be a partial solution — a UV light machine designed to sterilize N95 masks for reuse.

Farkas Baranyai of Wellington has teamed up with a couple of local craftspeople to assemble two models of the machine, sending one to a local health-care unit and another to a small hospital.

“Large hospitals may have their own sterilization systems, but our local health units are in dire need of protective equipment and how to take care of it,” said Baranyai.

Baranyai, an elevator technician, said he happened to read a New York Times article about how researchers at the University of Nebraska Medical Centre were using UV rays to sterilize the masks.

“I’m a problem solver, so I thought: I’ve assembled UV units before. If they can do that there, I can build a machine like that here,” he said.

Health-care workers across Canada face a shortage of PPE, and Premier Doug Ford said Ontario could run out of the crucial N95 masks in a week. A shipment of millions of N95s was temporarily halted at the U.S. border this week as the country threatened to ban exports, increasing pressure. Local manufacturers and university researchers have started producing masks.

While research is inconclusive on whether the N95 masks (which keep out airborne particles) can be properly disinfected and safely reused — and which disinfectant methods work — Baranyai says his UV light machine could help for now.

He and two partners assembled the machine in 11 days, from concept to completion. He describes it as a stainless steel box with a hinged lid holding two UVC lights. The interior has a four-square-foot shelf that can hold about 20 masks at a time. Foil tape helps reflect rays from the bottom and sides during sterilization.

A fundraising effort he launched raised over $800, which helped him buy some materials.

Baranyai, who called he project a gesture for his community, feared hospitals would turn him down since health authorities have not officially approved. He noted it’s hard to even find the proper channels during a crisis.

The two health-care centres that received these UV light machines have yet to start using them, pending proper guidelines.

Joshua Colby, an ER physician at Prince Edward Family Health Team, which received one of the two machines, said the use of UV light machines to sanitize masks is “a nascent field” with much uncertainty.

He mentioned research underway at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario on the machines’ efficacy on N95 masks. UV light has been used for years in vent-hoods in academic centres where bacterial, viral and cell cultures were used and a sterile setting was needed. There’s some evidence that too much UV light can damage the mask, so a balance has to be found, Colby said.

“I would say that if we run out of N95 masks, the UV light hood would be a good option to sterilize used masks, although this is based on tenuous research for which there are few guidelines,” he said. “I would certainly prefer to use a UV-light-sterilized N95 over a cloth mask if I were going in to see someone with COVID-19.”

An official from the Lennox & Addington County General Hospital in Napanee, where the second machine was sent, said they’ll rely on guidance from Ontrario’s health ministry before using it.

The ministry says the evidence on repurposing masks is new and evolving. It’s working on options to ensure availability of PPE for health providers, including the repurposing or resterilization of N95s.

In a memo to stakeholders this week, deputy health minister Helen Angus said the Public Health Agency of Canada has asked for used PPE to be saved for potential reuse.

“Ontario Health is asking hospitals to store used PPE securely and is distributing a survey to understand hospital capacity for reprocessing, based on promising technologies to safely reuse PPE,” she wrote.

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Ronald Hofmann, professor of civil and mineral engineering at the University of Toronto, said the Nebraska researchers have put out some protocols on using UV to disinfect N95 masks. The International UV Association also believes using UV can sterilize N95 masks.

Hofmann said UV can work in theory but its effectiveness depends on the details. “The research community is scrambling right now to figure these things out,” he said.

If a hospital runs out of new N95 masks, their choices are to wear nothing, reuse their masks without any treatment, or use some treatment that in theory can do a good job disinfecting them, he said.

“We think that UV, along with heat treatment, and along with hydrogen peroxide vapour, are three good methods that show a lot of promise,” Hofmann said. “But the devil is in the details.”