The Virginia Tech group has published another paper looking at the impacts of indoor environmental conditions on microbes. In this case, it’s potentially a key clue to the on-going search for an explanation to the seasonality of influenza puzzle. It’s not just airborne humidity but also the droplet. composition that matter. Past efforts to find an explanation in relative or absolute humidity, temperature, or season have never resolved the questions. This paper sheds a lot of light on some of the key factors, and they turn out to be the interactions between the indoor environmental conditions, especially relative humidity, and the droplet’s composition. Mucus, salinity, and proteins were all found to make a difference in this study intended to discover the effect of respiratory fluids in combination with various relative humidity levels. You can see the paper here on PLoS One.
