Medical Safety & Global Health
Open Access

Abstract

Viral Penetration of High Efficiency Particulate Air Filter of Biological Safety Cabinet in microbiological Laboratory

YU Long, DUAN Wei, WANG XiaoDong, WEN ZhanBo, LI Na and LI JinSong

Objective: Biological Safety Cabinets are the primary containment device used to protect the worker, environment and product from exposure to infectious agents within the laboratory. Spores of Bacillus subtilis are used as tracer agents to test Class II biological safety cabinets in NSF/ANSI Standard 49 and others. However, none of these standards characterizes the viral challenge tests.

Methods: One model bacterium and two different phages were selected to challenge two new Class II biological safety cabinets strictly conforming to the NSF/ANSI Standard 49 requirements.

Results: The two tested biological safety cabinets met the requirements of personnel, product, and crosscontamination protection test no matter which agent was used to challenge the system. However, the high efficiency particulate air filter leak testing results indicated that viral aerosol might penetrate through filter while bacterial could not.

Conclusions: The penetration ability of viral aerosol through HEPA filter might be superior to bacterial. This viral testing method might be a potential way used for the exhaust HEPA filter leak certification due to being able to reflect the containment performance of biological safety cabinet truly and intuitionally.