PubMed · 8097219
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J Holton, G L Ridgway. 1993. Commissioning operating theatres.. https://doi.org/10.1016/0195-6701(93)90019-v
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Airborne dispersal enables plant pathogens to travel across fields, regions, and continents, fueling rapid epidemics and emerging disease threats. Biosurveillance, the systematic monitoring of airborne inoculum, offers the opportunity to detect pathogens before symptoms appear and informs timely, risk-based management. Recent advances in air sampling, molecular diagnostics, metagenomics, and imaging technologies have expanded the scale and resolution of pathogen monitoring, from single-species qPCR assays to community-level aerobiome surveys. Integration of biosurveillance data with decision-support systems, remote sensing, and artificial intelligence is transforming early-warning capabilities and providing novel insights into pathogen ecology, evolution, and fungicide resistance. Yet major challenges remain, including assay standardization, data interpretation, and translation into actionable tools for growers. This review synthesizes current approaches, highlights case studies in which biosurveillance has advanced disease management, and outlines future directions toward coordinated surveillance networks and precision agriculture applications.
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 polymerase chain reaction technology and related detection to outdoor air supply rates. We sampled air from 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. each workday, with each sample run for 1 work week. 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 carbon dioxide (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 3 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 similar to that in the 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.
BACKGROUND: A great deal of concern has arisen recently regarding the potential adverse effects of indoor fungi. Our understanding of this complex problem has been hampered by a lack of standardized protocols for performing an indoor assessment for fungi. Without such standards, it is difficult to compare results from one study with those from another or to measure the effect of indoor fungal contamination on a building and its occupants. METHODS: We reviewed the medical literature and here describe a hypothesis-driven approach to planning, sampling, and interpreting the results of indoor assessments for fungi. RESULTS: Fungi cause 3 primary adverse effects: (1) they can damage a building, (2) they can render a building unpleasant to live in by looking and smelling bad, and (3) they might cause adverse health effects in sensitive individuals. Sampling methods used to test hypotheses include air sampling for spores, measurement of allergens in house dust, and determination of microbially generated volatile organic compounds, ergosterols, glucans, and mycotoxins, as well as environmental conditions that lead to fungal contamination. CONCLUSIONS: Standardized approaches for performing and reporting assessments of indoor fungi are essential if our understanding of this complex field is to improve.