Comparing of Surgical Masks and N95 Masks in Prevention of Influenza: A systematic Review

Healthcare workers are at risk of catching respiratory infections due to repeated contact with patients in the front row. The purpose of this paper was to compare surgical masks with N95 masks in the prevention of influenza in health care workers in the hospital.

In this systematic review study, all articles published during the years (2005-2019) in both Persian and English on surgical masks and N95 masks were examined. These studies were conducted through the IranMedex, Magiran, IranDoc, SID, Elsevier, Pubmed, Medline, Cochrane databases.Keywords included surgical masks, N95 filter masks, treatment staff, Surgical masks, N95 respirators, health care workers and influenza. The result of this research was the achievement of 104 articles, which were obtained after deleting duplicate and unavailable articles (47) and review articles (10) and not having study conditions (34), 23 articles related to the subject. 13 articles were removed from the study due to lack of entry criteria, and finally 10 articles were included in the study.

Of the 10 studies, 7 were hospital-based, 2 were outpatient, and 1 were in the laboratory. Of these articles, 5 articles were about comparing the effectiveness of surgical masks with N95 masks and 1 article was about comparing the policies of choosing a surgical mask and N95 mask and 4 other articles were comparing surgical masks and N95 masks in preventing influenza. None of the articles found a link between the use of surgical masks and N95 masks and protection against influenza infection.

No association was found between the use of surgical mask and N95 mask and protection against influenza infection. Therefore, it is recommended to use surgical masks and N95 along with hygienic issues.