Thread by @loscharlos

“The Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University have developed a Model Clean Indoor Air Act, which state legislatures throughout the country could use in writing new indoor air laws.”

"We—and especially our children—should be able to walk into a store or a gym or a school and assume the air is clean to breathe. Like water from the faucet, regulations should ensure our air is safe." scientificamerican.com/article/kids-a…

"Kids are headed back to classrooms—Somehow, four years into a viral pandemic that everyone now knows spreads through the air, most schools have done little to nothing to make sure their students will breathe safely."

“Air is tricky. You can choose to not partake of the water or the snacks on the table, but you can’t just abstain from breathing,” notes Gigi Gronvall at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an author of a 2021 report on the benefits of improving ventilation in schools."

"COVID.. is far from the only airborne risk in schools. There are also other respiratory viruses, smoke from wildfires, mold spores, off-gassing from plastics and other compounds, air pollution from traffic and industry, & allergens that worsen asthma and add to sick days."

"Yet federal air standards are stuck in the 1970s, when they were mostly aimed at protecting people from secondhand tobacco smoke, says Joseph Allen, director of the Healthy Buildings Program at the Harvard.. Fully updated standards for buildings are years or even decades away."

"Schools could use federal money to update air filtration & ventilation during height of the pandemic. But a 2022 @CDCgov survey of school districts found that only half had taken simple steps such as opening windows.. even fewer had upgraded ventilation systems."

"The benefits go beyond protecting children and adults alike from airborne disease spread."

“Better ventilation is linked with better test scores and grades [and] better workplace performance,” Allen said at a July meeting about air quality held by the Bipartisan Commission

"It’s not even hard to make sure indoor air is clean. Even in the 1800s, by having open doors and windows, tuberculosis sanatoriums prevented the spread of disease by air. The CDC has extensive guidelines on what’s known as air exchange"

"If it’s too hot, cold, polluted or humid outside, heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems can clean up the air perfectly well when they are installed properly and used consistently. Their benefits far outweigh their costs."

“There never has been a building that we could not turn into a healthy building with just a little bit of attention,” said Allen, one of the country’s top crusaders for cleaner air, at the biodefense meeting.

“People are like, ‘There’s not a whole lot you can do about it,’ and that is why, societally, we need to do something about it,” Gronvall says. “We did this for water once upon a time, and we can do it for air.”

"In Congress, Representatives Paul Tonko of New York State and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania have introduced a bipartisan bill that would require the Environmental Protection Agency to list indoor air contaminants and develop guidelines (albeit voluntary ones)."

"The new federal Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) found a great acronym in its Building Resilient Environments for Air and Total Health (BREATHE) program, which will develop and roll out cool new air-cleaning technologies."

"But fancy tech isn’t enough on its own..Politicians won’t win elections by campaigning on clean indoor air. But once they have been elected, federal, state and local officials owe it to kids, their parents and their neighbors to fight this most invisible of all hazards."