Influenza Virus Detection and Surface Decontamination using Ozone Gas
Influenza is a commonly circulating virus that can cause between 9 and 41 million flu cases per year (Centre for Disease Control, 2022). These infections can be the precursor to secondary infections such as pneumonia, thus posing a risk to the population. This could be mitigated by implementing a method to accurately diagnose patients with Influenza, thus allowing them to get treatment faster. In addition, looking into finding a method to reduce transmission of Influenza in public settings would also be beneficial to reduce community spread and illness to vulnerable members of society. This project looks to tackle these issues by designing an assay for the purpose of identifying various Influenza RNA concentrations accurately, whilst also using the designed assay to examine ozone’s effect on Influenza RNA on various surfaces, allowing analysis on ozone gas’s potential to be used as a decontamination agent to reduce Influenza spread. This study has allowed the development of a Q-PCR assay that can be used to determine the effectiveness of various decontamination methods on Influenza RNA, whilst also allowing the collection of data suggesting Ozone is not an effective decontamination agent against Influenza RNA on metal and plastic over a time period of up to 3 hours.
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