Transmission of respiratory diseases: let's change the paradigm!


History shows that respiratory infections are not a fatality. It is a problem that can be treated by a reasoned action in terms of air quality.

 

Would you send your children to school if you learned that the water there was not safe to drink and that nothing was being done to fix the problem? Probably not! Yet you don't really worry about breathing a poisoned air in the officeYou're not really worried about breathing in airborne pathogens at the cafeteria, nor are you concerned about your company's lack of commitment to air quality...

 

This paradox is easily explained if we take a look back. Indeed, when in 1854 John Snow - the doctor and not the character of a famous series! - tried to convince the British of the origin of the cholera epidemics, he received a shower of criticism. For the public opinion and the public authorities, it was out of the question to designate the Broad Street pump as responsible. And this, regardless of the fact that it pumps its water directly into the excrement-stained water of the Thames. It is to the "miasmas" and the smells that we owe the explosion of cholera cases. And if the withdrawal of the pump confirms John Snow's intuition, it will nevertheless be necessary to wait half a century for the beginning of the sanitation works of the London water networks.

 

More than 150 years later, history seems to repeat itself. On the eve of the coronavirus pandemic, many epidemiologists considered the theory of an airborne transmission infectious disease as medieval. The modernity? It was necessary, according to them, to look for it on the side of the hygienist theory. Centered on droplets, this theory insists on the importance of hand hygiene and the coughing/mouthing label. Or, to put it another way, on barrier gestures.

 

But, fortunately, the health crisis has put an end to the duel between the Ancients and the Moderns. For both are right! Indeed, "thanks" to recent times, we now know that respiratory diseases are not transmitted exclusively by droplets. Many of them are airborne. A character which constitutes an essential determinant of the pandemic potential of a respiratory disease...

 

Hence the importance for many researchers to participate in the emergence of a new prevention paradigm of aerosol-borne diseases. For this, there is no need to go back and praise the miasmas again! The sanitation of the air in indoor spaces by new UV-C technologies make this aerosol transmission a problem that we know how to solve. However, we must take it into our own hands. Because, in the absence of constraining regulation, the problem of the quality of the air in the tertiary environments remains guided mainly by the voluntarism of the companies.

 

In the coming months, employees and facilities managers alike may be called upon to play an essential role: to become drivers of change.

 

You still doubt it? Contact us -> -> contact@blue-sun.tech

Marianne Fougère


Read the comments (0)

Similar articles


Be the first to react

Will not be published

Sent!

Latest articles

Transmission of respiratory diseases: let's change the paradigm!

08 Nov 2022

History shows that respiratory infections are not a fatality. It is a problem that can be treated by a reasoned action in terms of air quality.

Would you send your children to school?

When will we see a French-style Clean Air in Buildings Challenge?

30 Sep 2022

The pandemic has put air quality under the microscope of many scientific teams, calling on governments to take action.
Yes, you read that right: Clean Air in Buildin...

Air quality: a widely threatened "species

22 Sep 2022

As they become more frequent, more intense and longer lasting, fires and climatic incidents are not without risk for air quality.

Heat waves, fires, floods...

Categories

Implementation & referencing Simplébo

Connection