Here Comes the Sun—Methylene Blue in Combination with Sunlight Sanitises Surgical Masks Contaminated with a Coronavirus and a Tenacious Small Non-Enveloped Virus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the context of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the reuse of personal protective equipment, specifically face coverings, has been recommended. Reuse of such items necessitates procedures to inactivate contaminating human respiratory and gastrointestinal pathogens. We previously demonstrated decontamination of face coverings contaminated with either infectious SARS-CoV-2 and animal coronaviruses or a highly resistant, non-enveloped norovirus via a novel photochemical treatment. Contaminated materials were coated with photosensitive methylene blue dye and were subsequently exposed to a visible bright light source (LED-equipped light boxes) to trigger the generation of virucidal singlet oxygen. A possible factor restricting the widespread use of such photochemical decontamination is its reliance on the availability of electricity to power light sources. Here, we show that natural sunlight can be used in lieu of artificial light. We demonstrate efficient inactivation of a SARS-CoV-2 surrogate, porcine respiratory coronavirus, via 10 µM dye coating in conjunction with short outdoor exposures of 5–30 min (blue sky to cloudy day; mean 46,578 lx). A tenacious human norovirus surrogate, murine norovirus, is inactivated via methylene blue solar decontamination involving 100 µM dye concentrations and 30 min of high-illuminance sunlight (blue sky; mean 93,445 lx) or 2 h of mid- to low-illuminance (cloudy day; mean 28,558 lx). The protocol developed here thus solidifies the position of methylene blue solar decontamination as an important equitable tool in the package of practical pandemic preparedness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".