Here at the intersection of microbial ecology and building science we spend a lot of time talking about “what is known?”… or in most cases “what don’t we know?”. In this sense “we” is considered the sum total of people working on these topics.
Until this week, I’d never thought much about “what do non-scientists know, or think they know, about environmental hazards indoors?”. I had an interesting psychology paper brought to my attention recently that attempts to measure this very thing, through the creation of an “indoor environmental knowledge scale”.
However, I was sad to see that microbes got short shrift in the questions with only 4 of 78 questions relating to microbes and all of these dealt with “mold”.
