According to a 2020 review by Marcel Loomans, an indoor environment engineer at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, student cognitive performance falls by up to 13% when carbon dioxide concentrations rise from 600 to 1000ppm, and by 24% at 1800ppm. Anyone who has had trouble staying awake in a packed lecture theatre won’t be surprised by this. Poor indoor air quality also negatively affects cognitive performance, especially in crowded environments. Additionally, humans contribute to indoor air composition by breathing out a plume of carbon dioxide and reactive trace gases. Cooking and fires, especially wood burning stoves, pump out particles into the room. So do cleaning and personal care products, air fresheners and scented candles. ‘The amount of air pollution that we breathe during our lifetimes is dominated by the air that we breathe indoors,’ says Corsi.īuilding materials, furniture and soft furnishings release harmful volatile organic compounds such as formaldehyde into the air. Contaminant concentrations in indoor air are typically much higher than those in outdoor air, and indoor air pollution has increasingly been linked with cancer, cardiovascular disease and respiratory disease. The indoor air is filled with a soup of potentially harmful gases and particles, some of which float in from the outside, but many of which originate inside. The public health – and therefore economic – consequences of poor indoor air quality go beyond virus transmission. Student absences increase with increases in carbon dioxide levels in classrooms A June 2022 report commissioned by the Royal Academy of Engineering found the annual societal costs of seasonal respiratory diseases in the UK is £8 billion per year, rising to £23 billion in a pandemic year. Transmission occurs much less frequently outdoors because the wind tends to rapidly blow away the infectious particles. ‘The more virions that one inhales the higher the probability of infections – and so there is a compelling case to be made for lowering inhalation dose,’ explains Richard Corsi, an indoor air engineer at University of California Davis in the US. When others breathe these particles in, they too can become infected with the virus. Cigarette smoke is an imperfect but useful analogy. These virus-laden particles stay suspended in the air – and therefore are often called aerosols – for some time. ‘When we talk, when we sneeze, when we cough, even just when we breathe, little bits of saliva and respiratory fluid leave our bodies and there is a chance the virus may be in these ,’ explains Jose-Luis Jimenez, an aerosol and indoor air chemist at University of Colorado Boulder, US. Viruses are present in the saliva and fluids lining the respiratory tract of infected people. Robust evidence shows that many respiratory viruses, including those responsible for Covid-19, flu and the common cold, are airborne. Firstly, it is where we do most of our breathing – people in the global north spend, on average, 90% of their time inside buildings or vehicles.ĭisease transmission is another reason, with airborne viruses spreading much better indoors than out. The need explainedĬlean indoor air is vital for a number of reasons. What changes are needed to address this invisible menace to human health, and will the pandemic be the trigger that finally sees it addressed? Chemistry World talks to an interdisciplinary group of experts to hear their views. The Covid-19 pandemic has given poor indoor air quality its first significant moment in the spotlight. The great smog of London in 1952, which claimed an estimated 8000 lives over five days, led to the UK’s Clean Air Act of 1956 and other (ongoing) global efforts to clean up the outdoor air. Poor drinking water quality, at least in the global north, was dealt with during the mid-19th century after cholera outbreaks in London were linked to contaminated water. Today, the indoor air revolution remains long overdue. Would she be surprised to learn that, over 160 years later, this same aversion persists? These are Florence Nightingale’s opening words in the first chapter of her 1859 book Notes on Nursing, and she goes on to bemoan the reluctance to open windows and doors, both in hospitals and at home, for half a dozen more pages. Yet what is so little attended to? Even when it is thought about at all, the most extraordinary misconceptions reign about it.’ ‘The very first canon of nursing, the first and last thing upon which a nurse’s attention must be fixed… is this: to keep the air that he breathes as pure as the external air, without chilling him.
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