Textiles — Determination of antiviral activity of textile products

Abstract

Recently, along with the global improvement in the level of living, consumers are showing the trend to seek healthcare or health protective products. Also, an increase in the people’s interest for protection against epidemic diseases has been noted, as the overcrowded commuting train car where the commuters experience every day, the hospitals, nursing homes, etc. Being supported by the processing technology of textile products to provide a high performance which has been highly developed recently, the health protective and hygiene relating products have been advancing into the market. Because those products are relatively new and included the technical aspects out of textile technology, the testing methods have been developed by the individual producers to evaluate the product performance. That has resulted in inexistence of a unified test method, hindering for both consumers and producers a true explanation or understanding of those high functional products. The antiviral product is one of those products and includes the technical fields of the textile technology and the biotechnology. The demand to establish an international standard has been growing in the consumers, retailers, producers, etc. as the stakeholders in the market. Antiviral textile products are textiles capable of reducing the number of infective virus particles that contact the surface of the textile. This document provides a quantitative test method to assess the antiviral performance of such products. The data obtained in an objective manner by this document give the common knowledge to all the stake holders such as consumers, producers, retailers, etc. to understand the correct performance of the antiviral textile products. There are two methods to quantify the number of infective virus, as infective virus titre in this document, which are the plaque method and the TCID50 method. The method used can be selected by the experience and the convenience of each testing house. Any appropriate cellular system can be used and that the testing conditions when used should be reported.