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Question from Delise Bravo-Bussey of McDonald, TN (USA) – Do you want to send a question too? Click here
There is a woman and a man behind the mask, so important and rare for those who are in the front line in the fight against the new coronavirus. Each in due course, the American Sara Little Turnbull and the Taiwanese Peter Tsai were the great minds that bequeathed the N95 to the world, obviously all supported by colleagues, partners and research and development assistants.
Sara was a designer who worked for almost 20 years as a decoration editor for House Building magazine. In 1958, he left the publication to open his own industrial design consultancy. One of its first clients was 3M. In the company’s fabric and gift packaging department, Sara came into contact with new technology.
By airing over a layer of molten polymer, the company discovered how to produce fabrics without interlocking lines, since fabrics have been traditionally made since ancient times. Sara worked with the first application of these materials: the production of stiffer trim tapes.
Sara saw so much future in thin, light and moldable non-woven fabrics that she thought of a hundred products that used the material. One was a bra that, involuntarily and indirectly, inspired the creation of the N95. Even in the 1950s, Sara followed the illness of close relatives, which motivated her to work on the design of a mask for use by health professionals in hospitals, the similarity between the sketches she designed for the bra and the mask. they are undeniable, in addition to the inspiration of the bulge and the elastic of the feminine piece for the metal and for the ribbons that hold and adjust the N95 to the face.
There’s also a popular 3M story about an employee who, testing the bra for other purposes, found that the fabric was so porous and “breathed” so well that it served to filter the grease from the soup he prepared at home, then the material served. for the development of an oil filter. Even with all the innovation in sealing, coupling to the face with elastic tapes instead of knot-tied tapes and the ability to spread microparticles without disturbing breathing, the mask did not go to hospitals as it did not stop agents Biologicals like bacteria and viruses. .
But industrial use skyrocketed. In 1972, the N95 was born as a device to protect the lungs of construction workers, miners, and other industries whose environment contained harmful particles to the respiratory system, such as asbestos and coal. The mask was named N95 because it is efficient at capturing non-greasy particles (hence the letter N, “no”) and retains up to 95% of microparticles up to 0.3 microns (1 micron is one thousandth of a millimeter) present in the air.
But the mask took more than 20 years to enter hospitals, as Sara idealized. And that’s where Taiwanese Peter Tsai appears in the story, although he was never a health professional. In 1992, the guy started to develop the technology that would make the N95 jump in quality.
It happened 145 km from her home, dear Delise, when Tsai was a researcher at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Throughout their doctorate, the Taiwanese studied everything: mathematics, physics, electrical engineering, mechanics, chemistry and everything that appeared. While an average Ph.D. served 90 credits, he accumulated 500 in his school curriculum. In the midst of so many disciplines, materials engineering appeared. It was the surgical touch that Tsai lacked in this interdisciplinary broth to improve the filtration of N95.
By undergoing an electrical process called corona discharge, look at the irony of fate, the mask material became ionized. This electrostatic effect incorporated in the N95 fabric increased the filtering capacity tenfold.
Therefore, in addition to the efficiency of the physical barrier, provided by the way the holes are structured in the material, Tsai added an “electrical varnish”, which made even smaller particles adhere even more to the fabric. And that’s how bacteria and viruses were finally stopped at the masquerade.
The technology patented by Tsai and the company added to a tuberculosis outbreak in the 1990s, opened the eyes of the industry to the possibility of adapting the N95 to hospital environments to protect health professionals from the spread of disease. transmitted by microparticles in the air. .
And in this protection for doctors, nurses and hospital personnel is the most important difference between N95 and surgical masks: N95 is a respirator mask, which protects the user from inhaling particles; Surgical and fabric masks, in turn, do not protect the wearer, but work in the opposite direction, preventing the person from spraying harmful particles around.
In short, because it is important to note: N95 prevents inhalation of the virus that comes from the outside, while surgical or cloth masks reduce its spread through the air. That is why there are recommendations and even calls from the authorities for the N95 to be aimed exclusively at health professionals who are facing covid-19.
The N95 shortage began before the pandemic. Demand increased earlier in the year due to major fires in California and Australia. With the global difficulty of supplying the mask to so many hospitals and professionals, Tsai returned from the retirement that started in 2019. Right now, he is collaborating with a team of scientists from various countries to establish procedures to clean the masks that he helped create. The goal is to allow the same unit to be reused multiple times while maintaining efficiency.
A round of applause for the work of Sara (who died in 2015), Tsai and all the health professionals protected by their work. May these anonymous heroes always be recognized behind the mask they wear.
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Post-credit scene: In 2018, a year before retiring, Tsai discovered an ionization technique twice as efficient as corona discharge to increase the filtering ability of materials. If applied successfully to the N95, it can cut the thickness of the mask in half, increasing comfort when wearing and breathing.
Consulting: Roger Almeida, cardiologist at the Alemão Oswaldo Cruz Hospital and Gilton Marques, gastric surgeon at the Sírio-Libanês Hospital.
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