Efficacy of air cleaning units for preventing SARS-CoV-2 and other hospital-acquired infections on medicine for older people wards: a quasi-experimental controlled before-and-after study.

Background: Nosocomial infections are costly, and airborne transmission is increasingly recognized as important for spread. Air cleaning units (ACUs) may reduce transmission, but little research has focused on their effectiveness on open wards.

Aim: To assess whether ACUs reduce nosocomial severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), or other, infections on older adult inpatient wards.

The airborne transmission of viruses causes tight transmission bottlenecks.

The transmission bottleneck describes the number of viral particles that initiate an infection in a new host. Previous studies have used genome sequence data to suggest that transmission bottlenecks for influenza and SARS-CoV-2 involve few viral particles, but the general principles of virus transmission are not fully understood. Here we show that, across a broad range of circumstances, tight transmission bottlenecks are a simple consequence of the physical process of airborne viral transmission.

A machine learning approach to identify important variables for distinguishing between fallers and non-fallers in older women.

Falls are a significant ongoing public health concern for older adults. At present, few studies have concurrently explored the influence of multiple measures when seeking to determine which variables are most predictive of fall risks. As such, this cross-sectional study aimed to identify those functional variables (i.

Estimation of per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances mass loads in the Danube River using passive sampling.

As Europe's second longest river, the Danube is an important water source for drinking water and irrigation for many countries, before discharging into the Black Sea in the East. Per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have been observed over the last two decades in concentrations exceeding the European Union's drinking water guidelines for total sum of 20 select PFAS of 0.1 μg L.