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Airborne Contagious Disease
Published in Harriet A. Burge, Bioaerosols, 2020
Aerobiology is the study of airborne organisms and their effluents and the effects of these aerosols on other living organisms (people, animals, plants, fungi, etc). A convenient way to subdivide this complex topic is to consider: Sources and disseminators: the places where the organisms grow, reproduce, from which they are disseminated, and the modes of dissemination.
Biological hazards
Published in Sue Reed, Dino Pisaniello, Geza Benke, Principles of Occupational Health & Hygiene, 2020
Margaret Davidson, Ryan Kift, Sue Reed
Aerobiology is a specialist area that studies biological aerosols (bioaerosols); these are defined as ‘airborne particles that are living or originate from living organisms’ (Macher, 1998, p. 1). The following sections provide a brief introduction to a number of biological hazards: bacteria, fungi, allergens, viruses, protozoans and prions.
Monitoring airborne pollen in New Zealand
Published in Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 2022
In those parts of the world that currently lack pollen monitoring networks, allergy practitioners and patients tend to rely on static pollen calendars to manage and treat their symptoms. For example, a pollen calendar for New Zealand promoted by Allergy New Zealand (www.allergy.org.nz/site/allergynz/Annual%20Pollen%20Calendar%202018%20A3.pdf) shows which allergenic pollens are likely to be prevalent during the various months of the year. Although the usage of such calendars is understandable, in the absence of empirically based pollen counts and forecasts, it is not always clear what the pollen calendars are based on, nor what regions they are applicable to. If we consider the diversity of pollen recorded to date from New Zealand pollen sites (Figure 1), reflecting the heterogeneous regional climates and vegetation cover and a wide variety of land uses, a single New Zealand wide pollen calendar can have little more value than a single New Zealand wide weather forecast. Not surprisingly, the Australasian Aerobiology Working Group concluded that such static pollen calendars are of limited utility and have no value as indicators of peak pollen periods which are of particular interest to allergy sufferers (Beggs et al. 2015).
Identification of airborne pollen allergens from two avenue trees of India
Published in International Journal of Environmental Health Research, 2019
Tanmoy Basak, Arindom Chakraborty, Kashinath Bhattacharya
An aerobiological survey was conducted for two consecutive years (January 2013 to December 2014) in Santiniketan (23.688°N 87.688°E), a small township centring a central university, ‘Visva-Bharati’ founded by the Nobel Laureate poet R.N. Tagore, situated about 150 km North-West of Kolkata megacity. The air sampling was performed by Burkard personal volumetric sampler (Burkard Manufacturing Co., UK) to record the seasonal periodicity of the airborne pollen of L. speciosa and S. campanulata. The sampler (air suction rate = 10 L/min) was placed about 1.5 m above ground level and was run for 10 min during three different time intervals: morning (09:30–10:30 hr), afternoon (12:30–13:30 hr) and evening (19:30–20:30 hr), thrice in a week. The exposed slides were mounted, scanned thoroughly by a high-resolution light microscope, and pollen grains were counted according to the guidelines of The British Aerobiology Federation (1995). We have combined the three counts (morning, afternoon and evening) to make a total counts and all the data were combined to express it as monthly counts. Thus, the hourly counts were averaged to obtain the mean concentration which in turn gave the monthly concentration expressed as pollen grains per cubic meter of air (Chakraborty et al. 1998).
A remarkable review of the effect of lockdowns during COVID-19 pandemic on global PM emissions
Published in Energy Sources, Part A: Recovery, Utilization, and Environmental Effects, 2020
Van Vang Le, Thanh Tung Huynh, Aykut Ölçer, Anh Tuan Hoang, Anh Tuan Le, Swarup Kumar Nayak, Van Viet Pham
Only a limited number of scientific researches regarding the conceivable interconnection between epidemic diseases and atmospheric PM amount and dispersal have been circulated. A lately published paper about PM features indicated that a major part of the respirable microbes in PM (also including bacteria, fungi, and dsDNA viruses) were soil-associated and non-morbific to humans (Cao et al. 2014). Extreme air pollution coupled with maximum PM concentration could prove to be harmful during viral contagion incidents. For instance, a weakened immune system in an infected patient makes microbes more intrusive and ultimately cause the body more vulnerable to ailments (Yang et al. 2020). Along this line of thinking, a recent paper, hinged on a Lombardy research, reveals that PM concentration affects the human immunity, thus promote the virus transmission in some cases (Carugno et al. 2018). Nevertheless, here is a distinctive characteristic of PM emissions related to human health, in contrast to the already evaluated feature, in other words, the virus dispersal through the air. The current consideration is stressed on the endurance of pathogenic microbes in the atmosphere and, more specifically, their transmission through aerial particulate matter. It is particularly worth emphasizing the mystery surrounding possible impacts of exposure to aerial virus-bearing PM, even though the thorough assessments of the chemical structure of PM (Bilo et al. 2017) and its influences on human health (RamRamli et al. 2020) have been conducted. In specific, despite the characteristics to detect the airborne viruses, the deeply diluted disposition of viral bio-aerosols has proved to be a serious hindrance to aerobiology study in virus, for example, the reactions with virus-laden PM. A recent study, analyzing the function of PM, emphasizes that the “existence” of DNA signatures, which might be related to the probable existence of an infectious agent, should serve only as preliminary proof of possible threats (Qin et al. 2020). The principal modes of COVID-19 transmission specified by the World Health Organization include respiratory droplets and contact routes. Aerial dispersal is presently deemed probable in a certain situation, such as in aerosol generation activities (WHO 2020).