Thread by @LazarusLong13

H/ T @healthyheating for a VERY cool study!

Robot babies, Covid, and resuspended aerosols!!

Hang onto your nappies, kiddos - it's a good old Tweetorial 🧵 with a pay to play study. So, free!

TLDR? Vacuum your carpets, and run the most air cleaning filtration you can afford

"We are perpetually surrounded by a cloud of self-induced resuspended particles, referred to as the".... Pigpen effect (my thread, my word, Pigpen).

It is on the order of smoking in terms of particulate rates emitted. twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Infants can travel up to 20 football fields during a day, with a path as crazy as a cat zigzagging through a room full of Roombas.

If we can kick up our own dust, you would think infants could. And that's what they set out to measure. twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

That dust cloud is a mix of chemical and biological stuff. Like living and dead microorganisms such as bacteria. Biological excretions like animal and mite allergens.

And PFAs, phthalate plasticizers, and flame retardant.

And might include toxic metals like lead. twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

So, they put together a robot infant and ran her over 12 carpets methodically.

And when I say methodically, I mean it.

In the Methods section, there is a link

(I made the mistake of starting this thread last night. Chuckie, below, made his appearance in a nightmare.)

that Adobe Acrobat is not letting me grab from the PDF. So, here is where you can find it.

Aerosol and airborne nerds will want to.....fascinating!

When the baby started crawling, there was a significant increase in airborne particle concentrations, right where it would breathe those particles.

1.5 and 4 μm size particles? Possibly bacteria and fungal spores.

>6 μm - thought to be biological in origin.

Now, a truly interesting nugget?

When we walk, our personal cloud gets mixed pretty quickly into the overall room air.

Nobody puts Baby in a corner - but they sure put her into her own little cloud.

Because her crawling is not enough to mix that little cloud of resuspended

particles.

Another interesting nugget - older, cheaper carpets, counter-intuitively, might be better for Baby.

Finally, were the particles inhaled?

Absolutely - see below.

If SARS-COV-2 was brought in on your shoes? It could be kicked up by the baby. Of course....

the most likely source for those Covid particles are from us breathing them out, and then settling on the floor.

So, how can we help our floors stay cleaner?

Vacuuming, of course, but also by cleaning the air with HEPAs and #CorsiRosenthalBoxes (👇).

I strongly encourage you to go read the study yourself as it is methodically well-done.

And just a darn good read!

Here it is, free. (Click the blue button, "Open", on the right.)

sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1021/acs.es…

Oops...forgot to H/T for the gif - thank you!

https://twitter.com/davelant/status/1665372743536111620?t=2bf2gMZduFwK-HZwU5wvbA&s=19