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Ebola virus (EBOV) in body fluids poses risk for virus transmission. However, there are limited experimental data for such matrices on the disinfectant efficacy against EBOV. We evaluated the effectiveness of disinfectants against EBOV in blood on surfaces. Only 5% peracetic acid consistently reduced EBOV titers in dried blood to the assay limit of quantification.

The West Africa Ebola virus (EBOV) outbreak has highlighted the need for effective disinfectants capable of reducing viral load in a range of sample types, equipment and settings. Although chlorine-based products are widely used, they can also be damaging to equipment or apparatus that needs continuous use such as aircraft use for transportation of infected people. Two aircraft cleaning solutions were assessed alongside two common laboratory disinfectants in a contact kill assay with EBOV on two aircraft relevant materials representative of a porous and non-porous surface. A decimal log reduction of viral titre of 4 is required for a disinfectant to be deemed effective and two of the disinfectants fulfilled this criteria under the conditions tested. One product, Ardrox 6092, was found to perform similarly to sodium hypochlorite, but as it does not have the corrosive properties of sodium hypochlorite, it could be an alternative disinfectant solution to be used for decontamination of EBOV on sensitive apparatus.

Rapid inactivation of Ebola virus (EBOV) is crucial for high-throughput testing of clinical samples in low-resource, outbreak scenarios. The EBOV inactivation efficacy of Buffer AVL (Qiagen) was tested against marmoset serum (EBOV concentration of 1 × 10(8) 50% tissue culture infective dose per milliliter [TCID50 · ml(-1)]) and murine blood (EBOV concentration of 1 × 10(7) TCID50 · ml(-1)) at 4:1 vol/vol buffer/sample ratios. Posttreatment cell culture and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) analysis indicated that treatment with Buffer AVL did not inactivate EBOV in 67% of samples, indicating that Buffer AVL, which is designed for RNA extraction and not virus inactivation, cannot be guaranteed to inactivate EBOV in diagnostic samples. Murine blood samples treated with ethanol (4:1 [vol/vol] ethanol/sample) or heat (60°C for 15 min) also showed no viral inactivation in 67% or 100% of samples, respectively. However, combined Buffer AVL and ethanol or Buffer AVL and heat treatments showed total viral inactivation in 100% of samples tested. The Buffer AVL plus ethanol and Buffer AVL plus heat treatments were also shown not to affect the extraction of PCR quality RNA from EBOV-spiked murine blood samples., (© Crown copyright 2015.)