Scientists are exploring ways to make sure your office isn’t making you sick

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Scientists are exploring ways to make sure your office isn’t making you sick by focusing on tiny particles that can’t be seen with the naked eye.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health is investing $150 million in taxpayer funds to develop air systems designed to reduce the spread of illness.

Five teams from across the country are working towards what the agency calls “an immune system for every building” under its BREATHE — Building Resilient Environments for Air and Total Health — program.

The projects are centered around enhancing indoor air quality in schools, daycares, hospitals and even homes. But the research can apply to workplaces, and anywhere else people gather indoors.

Scientists are exploring ways to make sure your office isn’t making you sick by focusing on tiny particles that can’t be seen with the naked eye (AFP via Getty Images)

“We have the right to be breathing healthy indoor air,” program manager Jessica Green said at an event in Washington showcasing the research, according to an article published by The New York Times on Friday.

William and Mildred Wells, whose words Green was echoing, discovered the threat of airborne germs in the early 1990s and later installed ultraviolet lamps to disinfect Philadelphia classroom air during a measles epidemic in 1940, as science reporter Carl Zimmer wrote in the Times article.

Research into the prevention of airborne illnesses, which includes COVID-19 and the flu, has grown since the 20th Century. Now, experts are using biosensors to try to detect unseen germs.

Virginia Tech is leading one of the BREATHE projects aimed at protecting children in daycare centers.

The project involves a biosensor that enables real-time detection of pathogens and allergens.

The government is investing $150 million in taxpayer funds to develop air systems designed to reduce the spread of illness (Getty Images)

Researchers then use software that translates the data collected from the biosensor, along with other factors, into instant respiratory risk assessments.

There will then be an automatic response to the threat, such as adjusting ventilation and triggering filtration, according to researchers.

“Before this instrument, it would have taken us two days to figure out how much was in the air,” Linsey Marr, an environmental engineer at Virginia Tech, said in the Times article. “Now we’re doing it almost in real time.”

Marr was referring to Der f 1, a dust mite allergen that can cause asthma attacks. She demonstrated how a prototype detection device worked at the Washington event.

“We have 10 different things that we’re able to detect, and by the end of the program, there will be 25 different things,” she said.