LUBBOCK, Texas — On Friday, the Texas Tech Biological Threat Research Laboratory, part of The Institute of Environmental and Human Health, announced that the facility will be decontaminating personal protective equipment (PPE) for safe use. The laboratory has partnered with the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center to make this possible.
Dr. Steve Presley, the chairman and professor with the Department of Environmental Toxicology at TIEHH said the service will be provided to healthcare professionals, first responders and detention centers.
“We have created facilities where we can place PPE primarily face masks and N95 respirators and other face shields, we can put thousands into this room and then we run our vaporized hydrogen peroxide generator, and it kills everything,” Presley said.
The service can allow PPE like N95 masks to be used up to 20 times.
“We’re working with Dr. Min Kang, vice president of research at the Health Sciences Center,” Presley said. “Her and her team are coordinating this project, and we’re using our equipment and our facilities.”
Presley said the process can take an entire day, but doesn’t end there.
“It’s about one full day operation and then we wait a few days to make sure we have killed any virus. We use what’s called bio-indicators,” Presley said.
This is just one of the ways Presley said The Institute of Environmental and Human Health is paying off. Researchers have done more than 20 years of work to address environmental and human health issues.
“We are both an academic research lab as well as a CDC and Texas Department of Human Services Laboratory Response Network,” Presley said.
The lab was the first in Texas to test for the coronavirus, aiding more than 67 counties.
“It says a lot about the staff within my facility,” Presley said. “Dr. Cynthia Webb is the lab manager and she and, at the time before COVID-19 became a big issue–we began preparing for it because we saw it coming from both coasts.”
Although the laboratory was more prepared, the pandemic has still changed much of their practice.
“I had five full time staff members before this started and now essentially have 25 to 30 people in the building every day,” Presley said.
The laboratory is able to test between 350 and 400 samples per day.