This overview on defining risk of respiratory cancer from airborne pollutants summarizes broad issues related to a number of the environmental agents that are discussed in the articles that follow. Lung cancer kills more than 100,000 people annually and is the major form of cancer in both sexes in middle age. Cigarette smoking is the major cause of respiratory cancer and must be taken into acco...

We analyse the characteristics of a force-ventilated isolation room, and the contributions to transport caused by the movement of people and doors opening/closing. The spread of fine droplets and particles can be understood, to leading order, by considering the movement of passive contaminants. A scaled (1:10) model of an isolation room (with water instead of air) was used to analyse the diluti...

Little is known about the seasonal dynamics of biotic contaminants in swine confinement buildings (SCBs). The biotic contaminants of seven SCBs were monitored during one visit in the winter and one during the summer. Paired-end Illumina sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene, V3 region, was used to examine seasonal shifts in bacterial community composition and diversity. The abundances of 16S rRNA gen...

The objective of this paper is to summarize the available literature on the concentrations and emissions of odor, ammonia, nitrous oxide, hydrogen sulfide, methane, non-methane volatile organic carbon, dust, and microbial and endotoxin aerosols from livestock and poultry buildings and manure management systems (storage and treatment units). Animal production operations are a source of numerous ...

400 Volume 35 | Number 7 www.homehealthcarenow.org fection when “in use” during patient care activities. A window-mounted air conditioning unit that blows air directly in the vicinity of the patient in the home would also be a risk factor. When making home visits with clinicians, a common “seasonal” problem identified is that the staff do not turn off an “in use” fan before removing a dressing ...

We are interested in a DDDAS problem of localization of airborne contaminant releases in regional atmospheric transport models from sparse observations. Given measurements of the contaminant over an observation window at a small number of points in space, and a velocity field as predicted for example by a mesoscopic weather model, we seek an estimate of the state of the contaminant at the begin...

A survey of X-ray film processing departments revealed the main airborne contaminants to be sulphur dioxide and acetic acid at concentrations of about 0.1 ppm. Glutaraldehyde was not detected either in the ambient air or in the exhaust duct from an automatic film processor. Laboratory studies confirmed sulphur dioxide and acetic acid as the main headspace constituents above working strength pro...