NPPTL to Hold Webinar on New Respirator Fit Capability Standard

A webinar about the new ASTM F3407 respirator fit capability standard will be held by NIOSH’s National Personal Protective Technology Laboratory (NPPTL) on Tuesday, Feb. 23, from 2 to 3 p.m. ET. Fully titled “ASTM F3407 Respirator Fit Capability Standard: General Overview and Impact on Work Settings,” the webinar will introduce the standard, discuss its importance, and describe the effect it will have on healthcare and general industry settings.

According to NIOSH, a respirator’s fitting characteristic—or its ability to achieve a good seal between the respirator’s facepiece and the wearer’s skin on a wide variety of faces—is “one of the most important criteria for any filtering facepiece air-purifying respirator.” Prior to the publication of ASTM F3407, no voluntary consensus or government-unique standards existed to evaluate a filtering facepiece respirator’s fit capability before its use in an OSHA-regulated workplace’s fit-testing program. ASTM F3407 – 20, Standard Test Method for Respirator Fit Capability for Negative-Pressure Half-Facepiece Particulate Respirators, was published by ASTM International in October 2020 and is intended to increase the probability that available respirators fit a general worker population.

Registration for the NPPTL webinar is available via Adobe Connect. More information about ASTM F3407 can be found on the NIOSH Science Blog. A digital supplement to the September 2019 Synergist discusses the development of the new voluntary standard for ensuring the proper fitting of respirators.