Coronavirus Persistence on a Plastic Carrier Under Refrigeration Conditions and Its Reduction Using Wet Wiping Technique
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Coronavirus Persistence on a Plastic Carrier Under Refrigeration Conditions and Its Reduction Using Wet Wiping Technique, with Respect to Food Safety Hana Malenovská1 Received: 24 July 2020 / Accepted: 7 October 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic dictates that anti-contagion strategies should become matters of essential routine in everyday life. Fomite transference is one of the routes of transmission that has been considered for this virus. However, the risks associated with contaminated surfaces of food packaging kept in refrigerators have not yet been adequately assessed. In this study, a surrogate virus, Alphacoronavirus 1, was used to investigate the persistence of coronavirus dried on a plastic carrier at 4 °C. Techniques of wet wiping, with or without disinfectant saturation, were employed to evaluate their effectiveness in the elimination of the virus. If not wiped, the loss of infectivity of the virus on plastic surfaces was, on average, 0.93 log10 (i.e. 83%) per day of storage at 4 °C. Wiping with water-saturated material reduced the initial virus titre on the plastic carrier by 2.4 l og10 (99.6%); the same results were achieved through wiping with bactericidal wipes containing ethanol. Wipes saturated with a combination of disinfectant agents (didecyl-dimethyl-ammonium chloride, hydrogen peroxide) decreased the virus titre still more efficiently, by 3.8 log10 (99.98%) and also significantly prevented further transfer of the virus to a secondary surface through wiping. Thus SARS-CoV-2 transmission potential via contaminated plastic packaging and food may be efficiently eliminated by wet-wiping, especially when wipes saturated with specific disinfectants are used. Keywords Covid-19 · Alphacoronavirus 1 · Surface contamination · Food safety · Virus survival · Refrigerated food
Introduction COVID-19 is an infectious respiratory disease caused by the recently discovered SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. It has now reached pandemic proportions worldwide. SARS-CoV-2 spreads primarily through respiratory secretions, droplets of which may lead to infection through inhalation or via contaminated hands touching the mucosal membranes of the nose, mouth or eyes (Miller and Englund 2020). Fomite transmission probably plays a significant role in indirect infection and transmission of SARS-CoV-2 (Fiorillo et al. 2020; Ren et al. 2020). There is only limited evidence that virus particles on food products or food packages lead to the disease (Seymour et al. * Hana Malenovská [email protected] 1
Collection of Animal Pathogenic Microorganisms, Veterinary Research Institute, Hudcova 70, 621 00 Brno, Czech Republic
2020). However, refrigeration and the plastic materials that make up most packaging provide ideal conditions for the preservation of coronavirus infectivity, since the virus can survive for days in such an environment (Geller et al. 2012; Desai and Aronoff 2020; Eslami and Jalili 2020; Ren et al. 2020). Frequent han
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