ANTIVIRAL TEXTILES AND ANTIVIRAL ACTIVITY TESTING - THE USE OF BACTERIOPHAGE SURROGATE FOR ANTIVIRAL ACTIVITY TESTING

Abstract

The risk of dissemination of highly contagious viral diseases (as COVID-19, Ebola) led in the increasing need to develop functional textiles and surfaces with antiviral effect. Antiviral textiles are designed to reduce the viability and infectivity of viruses on their surfaces and by this way to reduce the cases of infection (including re-infection or cross-infection with contaminated textiles). Different antiviral agents and diverse techniques of their application are used for functionalized textiles manufacturing. The most often used antivirals are metallic and ionic silver and copper, iron oxide, quaternary ammonium salts. The aim of the process is to prepare textiles with long-term durable finishing effective in viral activity inhibition. The basic step of functionalized antiviral textiles development is antiviral effectivity testing. The safe method of testing with the use of Phi6 bacteriophage, SARS-CoV-2 and Ebola virus surrogate, was modified for antiviral textiles testing. The samples of textiles with antiviral finishing were tested by the bacteriophage-based method and excellent antiviral activity was detected for all tested materials. The woven cotton was used as reference untreated material, the different textile cotton structures with similar square weight were compared and no statistically significant difference was found between the resulting antiviral efficacy values. A simple and quickly feasible screening method for determining the antiviral properties of textiles, especially with leaching-type of treatment, was also designed and tested.