Whenever I got sick as a young child, my mom insisted upon opening my windows in the mornings to let fresh air in. She claimed it would help me get better if we let clean air in to flush out the dirty air. To me, it was a nuisance. I had the chills and resented …
Note by Jonathan Eisen Last week I saw an interesting new paper in AEM entitled: Indoor-Air Microbiome in an Urban Subway Network: Diversity and Dynamics. I thought it was of relveance of microBEnet so I wrote to the senior author Dr. Patrick Lee from the School of Energy and Environment and the City University of Hong Kong inviting …
One of the issues that was raised in the recent Microbiology of the Built Environment conference in Boulder was sampling, specifically what and how is the material collected for subsequent biological analysis. Industrial hygienists and those tackling questions of exposure have devoted a lot of time to developing methods for how to study the indoor …
Registrants for the March AAAS Symposium are recipients today of the following message from Anette Olsen at AAAS. “I’d like to let you know that the videos of each panel is now online, but they currently remain unedited. We anticipate another two weeks before the edited versions are placed online. In the meantime, here is …
Jordan Peccia has posted the slides from his tutorial, Molecular methods for bioaerosol analysis on Slideshare. If you would like to get a quick overview of molecular-biology based methods, this is a painless, accessible way to do it. You are encouraged to post your comments and questions after you review the slideshow. We hope to …
Illustration (from OpenScar.com) an explanation of the beginning of the spread of SARS in Hong Kong’s Amoy Gardens apartment complex where the index case was in a building 60 meters away from a building where about 45% of the 300 infected individuals at Amoy Gardens lived. Many of the other infected individuals also lived in …
You can download the database of over 360 publications that report characteristics of the indoor environment along with the microbes found in the studies. Each publication is entered as a record and includes citation, abstract, keywords, organisms, substrates, and environmental conditions as reported by the authors. The database in MS Access format is searchable for …
Many indoor environmental investigators have attempted to use volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted by microbes as an indicator of the presence or potential health relevance of the indoor microbiome. These compounds emitted by microbes are generally referred to as MVOCs. The airborne concentrations of MVOCs is usually too low for characterization by the usual indoor …
Indoor Air and Climate Change URL: http://www.epa.gov/ncer/rfa/2014/2014_star_indoor_air.html Open Date: 10/23/2013 – Close Date: 01/23/2014 Here are some of the important details: Summary: EPA announces an extramural funding competition designed to support research that improves understanding of how climate change affects human health through indoor air quality as adapted by building designs and uses. Proposals should …
The University of Chicago has just opened a massive new hospital on the university campus. Jack Gilbert is PI on a study of the evolution of the hospital microbiome funded by the Sloan Foundation. The evolution of the microbiomes in a set of hospital rooms is being studied continuously beginning before the hospital accepted the …