Infection control

Natural ventilation has been appraised as the main strategy in environmental control of airborne infection in resource-limited healthcare facilities. While natural ventilation offers a low-cost alternative in diluting and removing contaminated air, its’ performance in actual settings is not fully understood. This paper reports a cross-sectional field study of six hospitals in Thailand with an emphasis on ventilation performance of naturally-ventilated hospital wards and AII rooms. The results showed that ventilation rates of 3-26 ACH could be achieved in hospital wards.

Use of a portable HEPA filter cleaner in a room is believed to be capable of reducing the risk oftransmission of infectious diseases through removing the particles or large droplets to which pathogensare attached. It is hoped that the portable HEPA filter(s) can increase the effective air change rate (forparticle removal only) in a general ward to the ventilation standard of an isolation ward for emerginginfection diseases when there are insufficient number of isolation wards.

Nosocomial infectior1s are a major problem in many hospital buildings, with ,approximately 10% of patients acquiring such an infection during a hospital stay. Airborne transmission is one of the important routes for a number of nosocomial pathogens. To combat this proq,lem there are a number of engineering control strategies, such as the use of ultraviolet germicidal irradiation and advanced ventilation techniques, which can be used. This paper outlines the 'state of the art' in air disinfection, and reviews recent research work in this field.