Two million protective masks purchased by Finland from China have turned out to be unsuitable for use in hospitals, the Finnish government admitted on Wednesday. On Tuesday Finland’s Health minister Aino-Kaisa Pekonen had tweeted a picture of the first shipment of two million surgical masks and 230,000 respirator masks being unloaded at Helsinki airport on a Finnair flight from Guangzhou in China, saying they would be “checked and tested” before us.
Caution, caution before you buy imported respirators. The NPPTL to the rescue! They are the testing body that test our domestic supply of respirators and since their job is testing N95 respirators, they decided to test the imports to see how they stacked up. In summary? Not very well. First, many of them use ear straps, which are much less effective than the normal rubber two head strap configuration. It must be noted that 62.8% of the KN95s tested by NPPTL FAILED to meet N95 filtration standards. Of the 87 KN95 manufacturers listed on the FDA Emergency Use Authorization (Updated April 24, 2020), only 12 are found on the NPPTL test list, and only 25% PASSED N95 filtration criteria. A very poor showing. If you want to see the full article with the charts, click here.
With a shortage of respirators, the U.S. has been importing from abroad. The CDC has tested these respirators, called KN95, to filter only 30% of airborne particulates. Are these the masks we want to put on our healthcare professionals and first responders at ground zero of the fight to contain COVID-19? Read the full article here