Biological Indoor Air Pollutants: Assessment, Removal, and Health Risks

A special issue of Atmosphere (ISSN 2073-4433). This special issue belongs to the section "Air Quality and Health".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 December 2022) | Viewed by 2931

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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Epidemiological evidence shows that air pollution is responsible for several million premature deaths per year. By virtue of being responsible for these deaths, economic evidence shows that air pollution also imposes a so-called economic cost to society of several trillion dollars per year.

The diseases caused by biological air pollutants are one of the primary global concerns for both social and economic reasons, and given that people may spend more than 90% of their time in enclosed spaces, the investigation into the methods to remove and monitoring of indoor air pollutants is of paramount importance.

I believe that the timely publication of the results and implication of biological indoor air pollutant studies will stimulate cross-fertilization of knowledge among scientists and engineers in many different branches, provide a key for future exploration, and allow the formulation of recommendations to ensure a healthier life environment.

This Special Issue offers an opportunity to publish articles on the characteristics of biological aerosols in an enclosed environment, the methods used to remove microbiological indoor air pollutants, and the health effects associated with exposure to bioaerosols.

Dr. Ewa Brągoszewska
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • biological air pollutants
  • bioaerosol
  • indoor air quality
  • human health
  • bioaerosol sampling

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

14 pages, 2126 KiB  
Article
Investigation of Surface Bacterial Diversities and Compositions in the Global Subway Facilities
by Jeongwon Kim, Suyeon Bae, Sena Park, Sudheer Kumar Shukla and Keunje Yoo
Atmosphere 2023, 14(1), 140; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos14010140 - 8 Jan 2023
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2316
Abstract
Indoor microbes are a key component of air contamination that causes human health risks. However, compared with the aquatic and soil environment, microbial diversity and taxonomic structure and composition in subway facility are not well characterized. This study tries to explore surface bacterial [...] Read more.
Indoor microbes are a key component of air contamination that causes human health risks. However, compared with the aquatic and soil environment, microbial diversity and taxonomic structure and composition in subway facility are not well characterized. This study tries to explore surface bacterial communities by using swabs collected from four global subway facilities, such as Busan, Boston, Mexico City, and Moscow using 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing. The alpha-diversities on bacterial communities were significantly different between Moscow and other samples, despite the different sample characteristics among Busan, Boston, Mexico City samples. For bacterial taxonomic composition, three phyla such as Actinobacteria (41.1%), Proteobacteria (27.7%), and Firmicutes (18.9%), were most dominant among all samples, indicating that there was no significance (p > 0.05). The subway station surface samples were mostly dominated by Gram-positive bacteria, including genera Corynebacterium, Staphylococcus, and Streptococcus. PCoA analysis also revealed that the Moscow bacterial communities were clearly separated from others. In addition, core genera were only shared 75 genera among all samples, but 486 genera were shared with three global stations, such as Busan, Boston and Mexico City. These results suggested that the human activity and geographical environment potentially affect the establishment of the bacterial community. Although this study provided basic information on surface bacterial communities in the subway system, there is a remaining unknown microbiome in the indoor air environment. Therefore, we consistently try to understand the indoor environment’s microbial ecology in the subway system. Full article
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