The steam treatment has been a well-known sterilization method in a household for a long time and is considered to be a suitable approach for decontaminating FFRs when other decontamination devices are not available. Fisher et al. (2011) used commercialized microwave steam bags, which were designed for disinfecting infant feeding equipment, to decontaminate six FFR models and achieved 99.9% inactivation of MS2 bacteriophage with filtration performance above NIOSH certification requirements up to three cycles of decontamination.[18] Other researches also show MGS had little effect on FFR fit after exposure to up to three cycles of steam.[10,13,15–17] However, it should be noted that not all microwaves have the same operation power and the effect of higher power microwaves on FFRs is unknown. Also, the metal nosebands of FFRs may cause arcing, sparks inside the microwave oven, during exposure to microwaves, and the adhesive use in FFR can be damages and loosen the adhesion.
Bergman et al. (2010) evaluated six FFRs for filtration performance after a 30-minute submersion in 6% hydrogen peroxide (one part 30% hydrogen peroxide to four parts of deionized water) and all six N95 FFRs demonstrated no changes in filter performance up to three cycles of decontamination treatment.[10] Viscusi et al. (2007) submerged N95 and P100 respirators in 3% and 6% of hydrogen peroxide for 30 minutes and both cases show no significant filter performance degradation with N95 respirators but some performance variations with P100.[19]