Risk of indoor airborne infection transmission estimated from carbon dioxide concentration.

By S. Rudnick, Donald K. Milton. Indoor Air: International Journal of Indoor Environment and Health, 2003

614 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Wells-Riley equation, which is used to model the risk of indoor airborne transmission of infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, is sometimes problematic because it assumes steady-state conditions and requires measurement of outdoor air supply rates, which are frequently difficult to measure and often vary with time. We derive an alternative equation that avoids these problems by determining the fraction of inhaled air that has been exhaled previously by someone in the building (rebreathed fraction) using CO2 concentration as a marker for exhaled-breath exposure. We also derive a non-steady-state version of the Wells-Riley equation which is especially useful in poorly ventilated environments when outdoor air supply rates can be assumed constant. Finally, we derive the relationship between the average number of secondary cases infected by each primary case in a building and exposure to exhaled breath and demonstrate that there is likely to be an achievable critical rebreathed fraction of indoor air below which airborne propagation of common respiratory infections and influenza will not occur.

Subfields: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Infectious Diseases, Pulmonary and Respiratory Medicine

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dd169f1889d11cecdf7cd6850e67073ae9d91627

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

1. J. Jimenez
2. Josué Sznitman
3. Chia C. Wang
4. K. Prather
5. Linsey C. Marr
6. Zeynep Tufekci
7. S. Lakdawala

In Infectious Diseases

1. R. Smith
2. Jane Marie Heffernan
3. Lindi M. Wahl

Citations in the corpus

• Airborne transmission of respiratory viruses (2021, background): “Carbon dioxide sensors can be used as indicators of the build-up of exhaled air and serve as a simple way to monitor and optimize ventilation (192, 193).”
• Perspectives on the basic reproductive ratio (2005, background): “Topical issues such as the risks of indoor airborne infection ( Rudnick & Milton 2003 ), bioterrorism (Kaplan et al. 2002; Longini et al. 2004), and computer viruses (Lloyd & May 2001) also rely on this important concept.”