GAINSVILLE, Florida (PNN) - June 17, 2021 - The idea of children, including preschoolers, walking around with bacteria traps on their breathing orifices all day so shocked the conscience that last summer, a bunch of Internet parodies were produced illustrating such absurdity. Then, within weeks, most local governments mandated this cruel form of child abuse for an entire year without any study of the side effects. Now a group of parents from the Gainesville, Florida, area have shown that such masks are traps for harmful bacteria that potentially make children much sicker than from COVID-19 - the virus for which the masks were required but failed to mitigate.

Six Alachua County, Florida, parents reported the findings of the lab cultures of their children's masks worn in school. The parents sent the six masks to the University of Florida's Mass Spectrometry Research and Education Center after they were worn for five to eight hours, most during in-person schooling by children ages 6 through 11. Although many students across the country likely wore dirty masks indefinitely for numerous days, the face masks studied in this analysis were new or freshly laundered before wearing. One of the masks submitted was from an adult who wore it at work as a cosmetologist.

The resulting report found that five masks were contaminated with bacteria, parasites and fungi, including three with dangerous pathogenic and pneumonia-causing bacteria.

The lab used a method called proteomics to extract proteins from the masks and sequence them. The analysis detected the following 11 alarmingly dangerous pathogens on the masks:

- Streptococcus pneumoniae (pneumonia)

- Mycobacterium tuberculosis (tuberculosis)

- Neisseria meningitidis (meningitis, sepsis)

- Acanthamoeba polyphaga (keratitis and granulomatous amebic encephalitis)

- Acinetobacter baumanni (pneumonia, bloodstream infections, meningitis, UTIs - resistant to antibiotics)

- Escherichia coli (food poisoning)

- Borrelia burgdorferi (causes Lyme disease)

- Corynebacterium diphtheriae (diphtheria)

- Legionella pneumophila (Legionnaires' disease)

- Staphylococcus pyogenes serotype M3 (severe infections - high morbidity rates)

- Staphylococcus aureus (meningitis, sepsis)