"A Clunky Mask May Be the Answer to Airborne Disease and N95 Waste

Experts say the U.S. government has unintentionally encouraged a
dependency on imported masks by failing to promote elastomeric
respirators, a reusable mask that is domestically produced."

:By Andrew Jacobs
July 3, 2022
In the early 1990s, long before P.P.E., N95 and asymptomatic
transmission became household terms, federal health officials issued
guidelines for how medical workers should protect themselves from
tuberculosis during a resurgence of the highly infectious respiratory
disease.

Their recommendation, elastomeric respirators, an industrial-grade face
mask familiar to car painters and construction workers, would in the
decades that followed become the gold standard for infection-control specialists focused on the dangers of airborne pathogens.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention promoted them during the
SARS outbreak of 2003 and the swine flu pandemic of 2009. A few studies
since then have suggested that reusable elastomeric respirators should
be essential gear for frontline medical workers during a respiratory
pandemic, which experts predicted would quickly deplete supplies of
N95s, the disposable filtration masks largely made in China.

But when the coronavirus swept the globe and China cut off exports of
N95s, elastomeric respirators were nowhere to be found in a vast
majority of hospitals and health clinics in the United States. Although impossible to know for sure, some experts believe the dire mask shortage
early on contributed to the wave of infections that killed more than
3,600 health workers.

The pandemic has generated a bevy of painful lessons about the
importance of preparing for public health emergencies. From the Trump administration’s tepid early response to the C.D.C.’s bungled
coronavirus testing rollout and its mixed messaging on masking,
quarantining and the reopening of schools, the federal government has
been roundly criticized for mishandling a health crisis that has left
one million Americans dead and dented public faith in a once-hallowed institution.

Three years into the pandemic, elastomeric respirators remain a rarity
at American health care facilities. The C.D.C. has done little to
promote the masks, and all but a handful of the dozen or so domestic
companies that rushed to manufacture them over the past two years have
stopped making the masks or have folded because demand never took off.:
[snip]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/03/health/covid-ppe-masks-health-care.html

TB

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