Thursday, October 30, 2014

CDC took down its poster on aerosol spread--but here it is

1 comment:

SatyaPranava said...

Yes, this is the one I was referencing in the post above this one (I am reading down the blog).

I didn't realize they took it down (though I surely realize why they did as it's horrible). I showed it to many physicians, nurses, and other public health professionals and after reading not a single one of them could tell me the difference between the two (because based on their reasoning herein, there isn't really a difference).

Actually, to be fair, there is a difference, but it's literally for about <1 second when tiny droplets are expelled into the air, evaporate, then become a germ floating in the air (which is CDC's definition of "airborne").

Also, here's that great MIT article on fluid dynamics showing that sneezes aerosolize and go 20 feet and get into ventilation systems if they're of a particular size.

o Bourouiba, L., Dehandschoewercker, E., & Bush, J. W. (2014). Violent expiratory events: on coughing and sneezing. Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 745, 537-563.

http://math.mit.edu/~bush/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Sneezing-JFM.pdf


A much bigger article needs to be written about all this...there's just so much misleading/confusing information going out.