Bioaerosols: Advances and Prospects on Assessment of Exposure to Bioaerosols and Their Effects on Health
A special issue of Atmosphere (ISSN 2073-4433). This special issue belongs to the section "Aerosols".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (25 July 2023) | Viewed by 363
Special Issue Editors
Interests: indoor air quality; occupational exposure; bioburden; fungi; Aspergillus spp.; statistical analysis
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: azole resistance; biotechnology; mycobiota; Aspergillus spp.
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Exposure to bioaerosols is associated with adverse effects on human health. These exposures can have a major public health impact, as they are a cause of infectious and allergic diseases, acute toxicity, respiratory and neurological effects, and cancer. The health effects are related to bioaerosol diversity, while there is a lack of knowledge regarding threshold values and dose–response relationships for most biological agents.
Abundant bioaerosol exposures may originate from a wide range of occupational sources, such as waste disposal, sorting and composting activities, farming and livestock production, food processing industries, healthcare, and biotechnology industries, as well as in indoor environments, such as fungal growth associated with dampness and mold in dwellings.
Bioaerosol monitoring is crucial to support the establishment of exposure limits and a specific regulation of bioaerosol exposures for a more accurate risk assessment. In order to provide valid quantitative and qualitative data, a large discussion has been raised on the development of bioaerosol monitoring standardized methods for both indoor and outdoor environments.
These methods include the measurement of viable (by microbial plating) and nonviable (molecular methods) microorganisms. While traditional culture methods have been described to be of limited use, molecular methods have been adapted to quantify exposures to microorganisms and microbial constituents such as mycotoxins and endotoxins. However, the great diversity of molecular methods makes data comparability and the definition of exposure limits difficult.
Therefore, this Special Issue aims to gather recent research on the development of refined exposure assessment tools and validation of newly developed bioaerosol monitoring methods. Interactions of bioaerosols with non-biological agents (such as particles) and their potential health effects, along with the analysis of other bioaerosol characteristics such as antimicrobial resistance are also topics of interest.
Dr. Elisabete Carolino
Dr. Liliana Aranha Caetano
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- health impact and importance of monitoring
- references and limits (quantitative vs. qualitative)
- challenges in methods and technologies for sampling and characterization (molecular vs. classical)
- advances and predictive value of biological evaluation methods (in silico, in vitro, in vivo)
