How does a company that specializes in HVAC for the health care industry keep everyone safe from disease? It can be difficult, as Barbara Checket-Hanks points out in her 2006 article “HVAC Work in Infectious Spaces” on ACHRnews.com. The company has to think the situation through, to protect employees, health care workers, and client patients alike.
The day when a doctor could easily counter any infection with an antibiotic is vanishing. The widespread use of antibiotics is killing off the strains of infectious diseases that are affected by the medicines, leaving the antibiotic-resistant ones alive to continue breeding. Those antibiotic-resistant “supergerms” are increasingly prevalent.
Furthermore, some of the most devastating conditions are viruses and therefore cannot be fought with antibiotics. H1N1, also called the “swine flu”, is one such virus. The best way to stay healthy is therefore to avoid catching the illness to begin with, which means stopping the disease before it infects a new host.
Infectious diseases come in two main types: blood borne and airborne. Blood borne diseases generally require a mix of bodily fluids to pass from one person to another. For example, a person could pick up a disease by cutting himself on the same bloody piece of metal that recently cut an infected person. But blood borne illnesses also die quickly after leaving the body, so the infection risk is virtually non-existent as long as proper hygiene is practised.
Airborne infectious diseases are more problematic. All it takes is a cough or sneeze to put that disease in the air to infect someone else nearby. Airborne diseases also tend to be stronger than blood borne ones, surviving for longer without a host. A good air filtration system can act to pull some such illnesses from the air before they can infect anyone else.
Infectious diseases are common in places like hospitals and general practitioners’ offices — and in dental offices. Teeth cleaning sends blood and saliva from patients into the air, which also contain any infectious diseases the patients have in their systems. There’s evidence that even influenza can be transmitted as an airborne illness, despite the common belief that it only spreads through direct contact or fluid droplets.
HVAC Companieshave to worry twice about infectious diseases. On one hand, they must protect their employees, to keep their current workforce and attract new employees to the industry. On the other hand, they want to keep their clients and clients’ patients safe, too.
Certain health conditions and blood borne diseases hinder the immune system, and particular health care companies focus on caring for the immune-suppressed. A dental office specializing in HIV patients, an AIDS hospice, and a chemotherapy centre all take care of people whose immune systems are poor or essentially non-existent. The clientele can easily pick up an illness from an HVAC company employee performing necessary installations or maintenance, even if the employee isn’t sick!
Someone can have an illness and able to spread it without possessing any of the symptoms of that illness. Many diseases have an incubation period, a time when the host is infected but not displaying symptoms for the disease. In some cases, the host can still infect others during that time. Incubation periods are commonly a few days or weeks long, but some illnesses have incubation periods of several years. Also, some people are “carriers”, unaffected by certain diseases but still infected and able to spread them to others. For example, bronchitis may be passing around a boy’s school, but if he’s a carrier, he won’t catch it, himself — his siblings and parents will.
Even an otherwise mild illness can be devastating to someone with a suppressed immune system. The so-called “supergerms” are every bit as bad as a virus. Someone with a suppressed immune system doesn’t have time to cycle through antibiotics to find the one that’ll work for the supergerm. If the doctor’s first choice of antibiotic doesn’t work, the person might die before the doctor’s second choice can take effect. In fact, fully half of HIV sufferers die from some form of tuberculosis (TB), sometimes just from a latent (inactive) infection that becomes active when HIV damages their immune systems. Certain air filtration systems can hinder the spread of TB, making an environment safer for HIV-positive individuals.
Handling the HVAC needs for a building that serves the immune suppressed takes care and planning, to keep the clientele comfortable and safe while letting the HVAC crew do their job. Maintenance may mean installing brand-new filters in the air ducts and taking the old filters off-site for washing, for example, and limiting all contact with the building’s patients or residents.
A good HVAC system can hinder the spread of disease in multiple ways. Splitting the building up into multiple zones makes it more difficult for a disease to spread from one part of the building to another. Special air filters can be installed to help protect the immune-suppressed patients, and the number of air changes per hour can reach 12, meaning the air is filtered 12 times per hour. (Standard filtration systems produce 6 air changes per hour.) There is also some evidence that UV radiation systems might help prevent the spread of viruses.
While the first protection against infectious disease is the practice of proper hygiene, many infectious diseases spread despite it. Good filtration and ventilation systems pick up where hygiene leaves off, reducing the risk of infection from an airborne illness. This makes a building’s HVAC systems an important tool to prevent the spread of disease.