We have think about air quality the way we do about water
We have to get serious about cleaning it up, managing it and measuring what's in it, because air is the new poop.
It’s fascinating to watch the discussion about swimming in the Sienne. They have spent $1-1/2 billion to clean up the river for the Olympics, but a few days of rain may overwhelm it. It is simple math: what is the coliform count? If it is over a predetermined limit, it is back to the pools. If only we treated air the same way.
I occasionally go back and look at Twitter because of tweets like this one from Joseph Allen, Associate Professor and director at the Harvard Healthy Buildings Program, in which he makes some critically important points:
-There is great disparity in the way we think about and address different sources of environmental infection.
-Governments have for decades promulgated a large amount of legislation and invested heavily in food safety, sanitation, and drinking water for public health purposes.
-By contrast, airborne pathogens and respiratory infections, whether seasonal influenza or COVID-19, are addressed fairly weakly, if at all, in terms of regulations, standards, and building design and operation, pertaining to the air we breathe.
He is absolutely right, especially about building regulations, standards, design and operation- as I say about everything, this is fundamentally a design problem.
Florence Nightingale knew this, which is why her hospitals had lots of windows and cross-ventilation.
Bernard Bijvoet, Pierre Chareau, Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto and Richard Neutra all knew this, which is why we got a modern movement in architecture that promoted light, air and openness.
Dr. Wolfgang Feist and the pioneers of the Passivhaus movement knew this, which is why they demanded a separation of ventilation from heating and rejected heat recirculation, insisting on filtered heat recovery ventilators supplying fresh air.
Joseph Allen understands that this is a building design problem, which is why I was so cranked off by his book “Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Drive Performance and Productivity.” In it, he and his co-author bash architects and the green building movement instead of seeing them as allies.
Architects deep into the green building movement were always there to promote healthy buildings, full of light, air and openness; look at the work of Eb Zeidler 50 years ago or Tye Farrow now. They were and still are often ignored and not taken seriously. This is personal; my review of Allen’s book is no longer on the Treehugger website, nor are any of my “COVID is airborne” posts going back to 2020 because I am an architect and not a doctor, so the Treehugger powers didn’t think I was authoritative enough to satisfy Google’s algorithm; (Here it is from my archive) even Google doesn’t respect architects.
But ignoring his views about architects, Allen’s point about how governments focused on food safety, sanitation, and drinking water instead of air quality is spot on. There are a couple of reasons for this. As Allen and his associates noted in a 2021 report, A paradigm shift to combat indoor respiratory infection.
“Food and water contamination nearly always come from an easily identifiable point source with a discrete reservoir, such as a pipe, well, or package of food. Its impact on human health is early if not immediate in terms of characteristic signs and symptoms, so that diligent epidemiology can track and identify the source relatively easily… By contrast, airborne studies are much more difficult to conduct because air as a contagion medium is nebulous, widespread, not owned by anybody, and uncontained.”
Dr. David Fisman of the Division of Epidemiology, Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto, put it much more succinctly in tweets:
“Air is the new poop.”
Prior to 1912, typhoid fever was the leading cause of death in Toronto. Children died like flies from typhoid because our sewage and drinking water were admixed.
Around that time the city began filtering and chlorinating its water and typhoid basically vanished. Engineering controls based on the science around how a disease REALLY spreads: transformative.
We can do this with respiratory disease too. Air is the new poop.
After 1912, we passed laws regulating the quality of water entering our homes and detailed regulations on plumbing, venting, installation, and inspection of our toilets and waste systems.
We figured out what to do with poop, sort of. We first solved water by taking fresh clean stuff from upstream and taking all our human wastes and dumping them downstream in rivers and lakes. They claimed that this was fine, that running water purifies itself, and that “the solution to pollution is dilution.” That is, unfortunately, still the approach we take with air quality.
In a recent study, Lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic for ventilation and indoor air quality, Lidia Morawska notes that public health authorities ignored all those non-medical types.
“Very early in the pandemic, science and building engineering experts had no doubts that the virus was predominantly transmitted through the air and not through contaminated surfaces. Unfortunately, there are many more examples of authorities ignoring science.”
They still ignore science. COVID isn’t the only thing we need to worry about in our air. We have also learned about the dangers of particulates, moulds, and nitrogen oxides. Now that we know what’s in the air, we have to fix it. And we know how.
Air quality monitors should be in all our houses and as common as thermostats. Every home should have a heat recovery ventilator with filters for fresh air. Every new wall and window should be built to Passivhaus standards to control humidity and condensation. We should ban new natural gas hookups now and encourage owners of gas stoves to get rid of them.
It sounds radical, but things change as we learn, and we have learned that we are basically breathing shit. For years, in fact, centuries, we didn’t really understand the relationship between air and health. First, it was miasma, then germs, and now it is sort of germs in a miasma.
Now we know that we need new and stronger regulations and standards that treat air the way we treat water. Because as David Fisman put it so well, air is the new poop.
Oh the irony! Last night I was reading your book (so far so good!) & had to come into the house for a while as a neighbour was smoking. Reading this post while sitting on my deck having a cup of tea, & then had to come into the house because neighbour is smoking. Sigh!
Air is so important. The forest fire smoke ai have been living with most of the summer highlights that. Thankfully my home has healthy air systems...but it it sad to tell your kids it's too smoky, come inside.