Published ahead of print on January 30, 2004, doi:10.1164/rccm.200306-760OC Am. J. Respir. Crit. Care Med., Volume 169, Number 11, June 2004, 1187-1190 A more recent version of this article appeared on June 1, 2004
Submitted on June 9, 2003 Detection of Airborne Rhinovirus and its Relation to Outdoor Air Supply in Office EnvironmentsTheodore A Myatt1,1 Environmental Health, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA; Environmental Health and Engineering Inc., Newton, MA, USA, 2 Respiratory Medicine, National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College of London, London, United Kingdom, 3 Environmental Health, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA, 4 Statistics, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia * To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: dmilton{at}hsph.harvard.edu.
Rhinoviruses are major causes of morbidity in patients with respiratory diseases; however, their modes of transmission are controversial. We investigated detection of airborne rhinovirus in office environments by PCR technology and related detection to outdoor air supply rates. We sampled air from 9 AM to 5 PM each workday with each sample run for one workweek. We directly extracted RNA from the filters for nested reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction analysis of rhinovirus. Nasal lavage samples from building occupants with upper respiratory infections were also collected. Indoor CO2 concentrations were recorded every 10 minutes as a surrogate for outdoor air supply. To increase the range of CO2 concentrations, we adjusted the outdoor air supply rates every three months. Generalized additive models demonstrated an association between the probability of detecting airborne rhinovirus and a weekly average CO2 concentration greater than approximately 100 ppm, after controlling for covariates. In addition, one rhinovirus from a nasal lavage contained an identical nucleic acid sequence as that in building air collected during the same week. These results suggest that occupants in buildings with low outdoor air supply may have an increased risk of exposure to infectious droplet nuclei emanating from a fellow building occupant. Key words: Rhinovirus, air sampling, ventilation, office buildings
This article has been cited by other articles:
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
