Aerobiology plays a fundamental role in the transmission of infectious diseases. As infectious disease and infection control practitioners continue employing contemporary techniques (e.g., computational fluid dynamics to study particle flow, polymerase chain reaction methodologies to quantify particle concentrations in various settings, and epidemiology to track the spread of disease), the cent...

BACKGROUND A recent study carried out in North of Milan, an area that was recently colonized both by birch and ragweed pollen, showed that subjects developing allergies to these "new" allergens were much older than those becoming allergic to "traditional" airborne allergens, which suggests that predisposition to develop respiratory allergies is probably allergen-specific, persists throughout li...

OBJECTIVE Transmission of Staphylococcus aureus via air may play an important role in healthcare settings. This study investigates the impact of barrier precautions on the spread of airborne S. aureus by volunteers with experimentally induced rhinovirus infection (ie, the common cold). DESIGN Prospective nonrandomized study. SETTING Wake Forest University School of Medicine (Winston-Salem, ...

Remote sensing airborne hyperspectral data are routinely used for applications including algorithm development for satellite sensors, environmental monitoring and atmospheric studies. Single flight lines of airborne hyperspectral data are often in the region of tens of gigabytes in size. This means that a single aircraft can collect terabytes of remotely sensed hyperspectral data during a singl...

BACKGROUND Surgical-site infections due to intraoperative contamination are chiefly ascribable to airborne particles carrying microorganisms. The purpose of this study is to identify the actions that increase the number of airborne particles in the operating room. METHODS Two surgeons and two surgical nurses performed three patterns of physical movements to mimic intraoperative actions, such ...

Passive remote sensing (RS) of solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) of vegetation is feasible at ground level, airborne level and space borne level with certain prototypes. Fraunhofer Line Discrimination (FLD) and its improved methods have been widely used to extract SIF. Unlike processing at ground level, these methods do not work so well since it is not easy to obtain the solar incide...

Beside high end digital imaging systems which will replace standard photogrammetric cameras in the future, a large number of “lowcost” airborne systems were developed in the last years. The system PFIFF, a digital airborne remote sensing system developed by the author, is described in detail with special respect to demonstrate the photogrammetric potential of PFIFF. The demand for current digit...