Evaluation of the Filtration Efficiency of the N95 Filtering Facepiece Respirator for Airborne Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus
Abstract. Airborne methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) was detected inside a swine facility that presented a risk of respiratory colonization and infection to swine and swine workers. Viable airborne MRSA was sampled using an Andersen cascade impactor, and total airborne particulates were sampled using an optical particle counter. The filter efficiency of the N95 filtering facepiece respirator (FFR) was evaluated to determine its effectiveness for airborne MRSA. Our study showed that the filter for the N95 FFR had efficiency greater than 95% for airborne MRSA.
The issue of flexibility of multiword expressions (MWEs) is crucial towards their identification and extraction in running text, as well as their better understanding from a linguistic perspective. If we project a large MWE lexicon onto a corpus, projecting fixed forms suffers from low recall, while an unconstrained flexible search for lemmas yields a loss in precision. In this talk, I will describe a method aimed at maximising precision in the identification of MWEs in flexible mode, building on the idea that internal variability can be modelled via so-called variation patterns. I will discuss the advantages and limitations of using variation patterns, compare their performance to that of association measures, and explore their usability in MWE extraction, too.