![]() Professor Morawska said ventilation systems should also be demand-controlled to adjust for different room occupancies, and differing activities and breathing rates, such as exercising in a gym versus sitting in a movie theatre. “Ventilation systems with higher airflow rates and which distribute clean, disinfected air so that it reaches the breathing zone of occupants must be demand controlled and thus be flexible.” “Most minimum ventilation standards outside of specialized health care and research facilities only control for odour, CO2 levels, temperature and humidity. “We’ve provided strong evidence that airborne transmission spreads infections, so there should be international ventilation standards that control pathogens,” she said. Professor Morawska said response efforts to combat airborne viruses were too weak because airborne infections were harder to trace than food or waterborne outbreaks. ![]() “Mandated building ventilation standards need to include higher airflow, filtration and disinfection rates, and monitors that allow the public to observe the quality of air around them. “We need to establish the foundations to ensure that the air in our buildings is clean with a significantly reduced pathogen count, contributing to the building occupants’ health, just as we expect for the water coming out of our taps,” Professor Morawska said. I hope that we’ve learned an important lesson.” “The coronavirus pandemic shows us that our lack of attention to breathing healthy indoor air is a major vulnerability of our entire global economy. “We know from our work on indoor air and viruses in exhaled breath of people with colds and flu, and now also COVID-19, that respiratory viruses are present in the air we breathe indoors,” Dr. Don Milton, who has been leading the University of Maryland Stop COVID study for the past year to understand how people transmit COVID-19 and how to prevent its transmission, has decades of expertise studying how influenza and other respiratory viruses spread indoors. ![]() ![]() The international group of air quality researchers, led by Professor Lidia Morawska at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, called on the World Health Organization to extend the indoor air quality guidelines to include airborne pathogens and to recognize the need to control hazards of airborne transmission of respiratory infections.ĭr. Their commentary, published May 13 in Science argues for a shift in standards in ventilation requirements equal in scale to the transformation in the 1800s when cities started organizing clean water supplies and centralized sewage systems. ![]()
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