![]() ![]() The greatest hits from that era include John Snow and the infamous Broad Street water pump tied to cholera Ignaz Semmelweis and the practice of handwashing before delivering babies and the invention of the microscope, which allowed our eyes to finally catch sight of those microbes. The pendulum started to swing when evidence accumulated that invisible germs were making us sick. From the fourth century BCE to 1880, we in the West lived in the era of miasma theory: bad air caused bad things for humans. “Drain the swamp” was a motto of the Roman Empire, since swamps were thought to be breeding grounds for tiny, airborne creatures that made people sick. The word “malaria” literally means “bad air” in Medieval Italian. When not blamed on divine punishment, diseases were, for most of human history, attributed to foul air. And this is, hopefully, where we find ourselves now.Ī speed run through history can tell us how we got here. Over time, though, as the pendulum experiences friction, its movement becomes more nuanced and it starts to point in a more reliable direction. It’s the old bit about the pendulum: it swings from one extreme to the other, before making its way back to the first extreme. ![]() The irony of airborne denialism is that it is the product of rejecting an earlier dogma about all diseases being airborne. Now that the droplet dogma has been appropriately pilloried, the questions are: can ventilation and air filtration rescue us? And what made aerosols so taboo in our public discussions? Dogma, counter-dogma The virus could spread via respiratory droplets-those heavy globs that come out of our nose and mouth and rapidly fall to the ground-but it could also, these public bodies begrudgingly admitted, hang in the air and be breathed in by someone further away. Over the next two years, the WHO and other organizations that had initially denied that the new coronavirus could stay in the air and move around like smoke quietly changed their stance. Few diseases were known to be airborne.īut to aerosol scientists, this was both puzzling and infuriating. On March 28, 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) tweeted out, “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.”įor medical doctors and biomedical scientists (including me), this made sense.
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