Recognition of aerosol transmission of infectious agents: a commentary
By Raymond Tellier, Yuguo Li, Benjamin J. Cowling, J. Tang. BMC Infectious Diseases, 2019
720 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Although short-range large-droplet transmission is possible for most respiratory infectious agents, deciding on whether the same agent is also airborne has a potentially huge impact on the types (and costs) of infection control interventions that are required.The concept and definition of aerosols is also discussed, as is the concept of large droplet transmission, and airborne transmission which is meant by most authors to be synonymous with aerosol transmission, although some use the term to mean either large droplet or aerosol transmission.However, these terms are often used confusingly when discussing specific infection control interventions for individual pathogens that are accepted to be mostly transmitted by the airborne (aerosol) route (e.g. tuberculosis, measles and chickenpox). It is therefore important to clarify such terminology, where a particular intervention, like the type of personal protective equipment (PPE) to be used, is deemed adequate to intervene for this potential mode of transmission, i.e. at an N95 rather than surgical mask level requirement.With this in mind, this review considers the commonly used term of ‘aerosol transmission’ in the context of some infectious agents that are well-recognized to be transmissible via the airborne route. It also discusses other agents, like influenza virus, where the potential for airborne transmission is much more dependent on various host, viral and environmental factors, and where its potential for aerosol transmission may be underestimated.
Subfields: Infectious Diseases, Modeling and Simulation, Pulmonary and Respiratory Medicine
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3af2a50a4711db48012cf6972cb579f85cf1da40
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In Modeling and Simulation
In Pulmonary and Respiratory Medicine
Citations in the corpus
- How can airborne transmission of COVID-19 indoors be minimised? (2020, background): “…transmission are possible, but the predominance of longer range transmission route in various exposure scenarios is difficult to quantify (Booth et al., 2013; Kim et al., 2016; Kulkarni et al., 2016; Li et al., 2007; Tellier et al., 2019), and may at times be opportunistic (Roy and Milton, 2004).”
- The airborne lifetime of small speech droplets and their potential importance in SARS-CoV-2 transmission (2020, background): “The droplet nuclei observed in our present study and previously by APS (2, 9) are sufficiently small to reach the lower respiratory tract, which is associated with an increased adverse disease outcome (19, 20).”