Filtered Air from Decontamination Room: Ensuring Safety and Cleanliness

Where is the filtered air from the decontamination room exhausted to?

A. Outdoors

B. Sterile areas

C. Non-sterile areas

Answer:

Filtered air from decontamination rooms is exhausted outdoors or to non-sterile areas after being cleaned by HEPA filters to remove contaminants such as microbes and viruses, ensuring both environmental and laboratory safety.

Filtered air from the decontamination room is typically exhausted into the outdoor environment or into an area where it will not contaminate sterile spaces. HEPA filters are crucial in this process, as they are designed to capture microbes, endospores, and viruses, ensuring that the air leaving these controlled environments is clean. Specifically, these filters have high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) capabilities with an effective pore size that is small enough to trap these particles as the air moves through them.

In hospitals, HEPA filtration systems are strategically implemented in areas that require heightened cleanliness, such as burn units, operating rooms, and isolation units, due to the vulnerability of patients to infections. The same principle applies within biological safety cabinets (BSCs) found in laboratories, where the HEPA filters maintain a sterile environment both inside the cabinet for sample protection and also ensure a safe work area by filtering the air that is exhausted into the laboratory space.