Pandemic prevention“Paradigm Shift” to Fight Airborne Spread of COVID-19 Indoors
Humans in the 21st century spend most of their time indoors, but the air we breathe inside buildings is not regulated to the same degree as the food we eat and the water we drink. Scientists from 14 countries say that needs to change to reduce disease transmission and prevent the next pandemic.
Humans in the 21st century spend most of their time indoors, but the air we breathe inside buildings is not regulated to the same degree as the food we eat and the water we drink. A group of 39 researchers from 14 countries, including two from CU Boulder, say that needs to change to reduce disease transmission and prevent the next pandemic.
In a Perspectives piece publishing in Science on May 14, they call for a “paradigm shift” in combating airborne pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, demanding universal recognition that respiratory infections can be prevented by improving indoor ventilation systems.
“Air can contain viruses just as water and surfaces do,” said co-author Shelly Miller, professor of mechanical and environmental engineering. “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.”
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. 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.
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. But it would also correct a major scientific misperception that arose around the same time.
When people in London were dying of cholera in the 1850s, scientists assumed the disease was airborne. But British physician John Snow discovered that microorganisms in contaminated water were the reason. Similarly, Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis showed that handwashing before delivering a baby greatly reduced postpartum infections. 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.
