![]() ![]() His research on measles and tuberculosis - caused by airborne pathogens - challenged this notion in the 20th century, but didn’t break it. Yet in 1945, scientist William Wells published a paper in the predecessor to Science, lamenting that while we were investing in disinfecting water and keeping our food clean, we had done nothing for our indoor air, given the denial of airborne transmission. ![]() ![]() As a result, he stated that airborne transmission was almost impossible. Then in the early 20th century, American public health expert Charles Chapin erroneously attributed respiratory infections caught in close proximity to other people to large droplets produced by an infected person, which fall quickly to the ground. While these discoveries encountered great resistance in their time, scientists eventually agreed that in these cases, water and hands - not air - were the vector for disease. Similarly, Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis showed that handwashing before delivering a baby greatly reduced postpartum infections. But British physician John Snow discovered that microorganisms in contaminated water were the reason. When people in London were dying of cholera in the 1850s, scientists assumed the disease was airborne. But it would also correct a major scientific misperception that arose around the same time. Such a shift in ventilation standards should be similar in scale to the 19th century transformation that took place when cities started organizing clean water supplies and centralized sewage systems. The researchers now call on the WHO and other governing bodies in this new article to extend its indoor air quality guidelines to include airborne pathogens and to recognize the need to control hazards of airborne transmission of respiratory infections.Ī tangle of ducted air pipes are connected to a portable air unit being used to air condition a large hall. The paper comes less than two weeks after the World Health Organization (WHO) changed its website to acknowledge that SARS-CoV-2 is spread predominantly through the air, and 10 months after the WHO acknowledged the potential for aerosol transmission and 239 scientists (including Miller and Jose-Luis Jimenez) signed an open letter to medical communities and governing bodies about the potential risk of airborne transmission. “We need to understand that it’s a problem and that we need to have, in our toolkit, approaches to mitigating risk and reducing the possible exposures that could happen from build-up of viruses in indoor air.” “Air can contain viruses just as water and surfaces do,” said co-author Shelly Miller, professor of mechanical and environmental engineering. ![]()
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