Reusing PPE: ‘Disinfection room’ installed at Sir Salimullah Medical College Hospital

A team of experts has successfully installed a "disinfection room" at Sir Salimullah Medical College Hospital in the capital amid intense need for personal protective equipment (PPE) for health service professionals to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

Once operational, the disinfection room will play a major role in rapidly sterilising PPEs and allow their repeated use.

The team is now waiting for "efficacy testing" which is expected to start tomorrow (Wednesday) with support from the hospital's virology department, according to Bangladeshi-Australian chemical engineer Md Arifur Rahim, the brain behind the initiative.

"[We are] fighting a battle within the war, though slowly, but not stopping. There are challenges but we have to move forward. If a single life can be saved with this initiative then that will be the success. Every life counts," Rahim wrote in a Facebook post today.

In his Facebook post, he also asked for volunteers to come forward to join the initiative.

Amid the grim situation over the death of a Bangladeshi doctor and many health workers being infected with Covid-19 while on duty, Rahim recently came up with a mission to equip Bangladeshi hospitals with germicidal ultraviolet radiation (known as UV-C) facilities to rapidly sterilise PPE.

He has assembled a committee in Dhaka whose members are desperately meeting with officials, in an attempt to have the ultraviolet disinfectant facilities approved for usage.

The project has already been given the green light by the government's health authorities at what Rahim said was "unprecedented in speed". The challenge is now to have it taken up by individual hospitals.

One of the committee members, Dr Mahmudul Faisal Al Ameen is a computer scientist based in Japan, attempting to help with the project.

Last week, he met with administrators at Sir Salimullah Medical College Hospital to allow for a testing of the facilities, as part of a pilot project with several other hospitals in Dhaka.

If the trial proves successful in sterilising the necessary PPE, there is potential for the UV facilities to be rolled out across major hospitals throughout the country.

"We are very excited for this project to be successful," said Rahim, "but we cannot do it without the help of the authorities and we need volunteers to come forward, leaving panic aside."

The sheer scale of the PPE required, if there was a surge in coronavirus patients, would be impossible to handle. But many lives may potentially be saved if the currently available PPEs could be sterilised rapidly and re-utilised.

This practice is already on in many parts of the world. In China, entire buses are being lit up by the UV light at night in order to disinfect them. Robots are emitting UV light to clean hospital floors and even banks are using them to sterilise money.

The UV light scrambles the genetic material of viruses and bacteria rendering them dead. While there are not yet any definitive studies proving its effectiveness against Covid-19, it has been used with success against SARS, which is another type of coronavirus.