The First WHO/Europe Indoor Air Conference

Yesterday we could watch the conference live stream of the first indoor air quality conference. It was available in French, German, Russian and English. The link is to the English language version.

This is an interesting conference to have because, as two or more speakers highlighted, we spend up to 80 percent of our lives indoors, whether at work, at school, at home or at play. Think of indoor climbing for example, or the gym, and restaurants. By spending so much time indoors it is important to think about how we aerate but also ensure that air is healthy.

One speaker said "We're never taught how to properly aerate buildings, we just improvise". This is interesting, and you can see this during a heatwave. A few years ago I worked in an office on the ground floor. It would get very warm. I had no air conditioning so with trial and error I learned that if I opened the window, and the door to the rest of the building I could get a nice draft to cool down. By doing this I created a draft but this brings us to the second issue.

The air from outside may not be idea. A speaker dealing with TB patients in Siberia said that when it's -42°c outside you can't open windows to get fresh air, without freezing, so you need to find other solutions. In other cases you may open a window for fresh air but you may get ozoneor other forms of air pollution so it makes sense not to expose yourself to the health consequences of breathing that air.

Another speaker spoke about air, in contrast to mineral water. He spoke about how we filter out some materials from water, but preserve others. Look at the info on a brita filter. "We filter these things out but we preserve magnesium and caclium" or something to that effect. The point is that some things that are in the air may be worth keeping. He didn't specify what we should keep.

He also went on to say that we should have an air quality index, to standardise how clean air should be. Another speaker went so far as to say that we have fire regulations for occupancy in case of fire and sitting space but we should also have maximum occupancy regulations, in relation to air circulation and cleaning.

The list of Speakers

And Finally

As buildings become airtight, so the need to ensure that the air within is healthy, becomes paramount. Since we spend 80 percent of our time indoors it is critical, for our health, to ensure that the air we breath is healthy. I hope that this conference gathers momentum and becomes critical moving forward.