Hospital Autoclavers may allow safe reuse of N95 masks

Freshly Exhumed writes: "[Autoclaving] is like a pressure cooker — basically you enclose items into a chamber, you lock down the chamber, you heat it up and actually increase the pressure inside the chamber," Kumar said. The machines heat up to about 121 C for 15 minutes, killing bacteria and viruses. "It'll sterilize anything". The assumption has been that if you tried this on an N95 mask they would degrade rapidly. We thought we'd give it a try anyway," Kumar said. "And actually what we found is while it does degrade some [types of] masks, there's a certain group of masks that are made of kind of a fabric-type material, rather than being moulded closely to the face they're called pleated [masks]," he said.