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The World Health Organization and nearly 500 experts have agreed for the first time on what it means for a disease to spread through the air, avoiding confusion at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic that some scientists feared It is said that people lose their lives due to this.
The Geneva-based United Nations health agency released a technical document on the topic on Thursday. It said this was a first step towards working on how to better prevent such transmission, both for existing diseases like measles and for future pandemic threats.
The document concludes that the descriptor “airborne” can be used for infectious diseases where the main type of transmission involves pathogens traveling through the air or suspended in the air, which is “waterborne”. Consistent with other terms such as diseases, which are understood by all disciplines and the public.
Also read: WHO classifies JN.1 as ‘variant of interest’ amid sharp rise in Covid-19 cases
Nearly 500 experts contributed to this definition, including physicists, public health professionals, and engineers, many of whom had bitterly disagreed on the topic in the past.
Historically agencies have required a high level of evidence before declaring diseases airborne, which requires very stringent containment measures; The new definition says the risk of exposure and the severity of the disease must also be considered.
Also read: Don’t ‘relax’: WHO warns on Covid ahead of winter
Previous disagreements also centered on whether infectious particles were “droplets” or “aerosols” based on size, which the new definition eliminates.
During the early days of COVID in 2020, nearly 200 aerosol scientists publicly complained that WHO had failed to warn people about the risk that the virus could spread through the air. He said this led to more emphasis being placed on measures like hand washing rather than focusing on ventilation to stop the virus.
By July 2020, the agency said there was “emerging evidence” of airborne spread, but its then-chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan – who started the process of getting a definition – later said WHO should have been more forceful “long ago”. Was Needed.
Also read: WHO warns of troubling COVID-19 trends in coming months, says ‘new Omicron variant will be closely monitored…’
His successor, Jeremy Farrar, said in an interview that the new definition was about more than COVID, but he said there was a lack of available evidence at the beginning of the pandemic and that experts, including the WHO, acted in “good faith.” Did. At the time, he was head of the Wellcome Trust charity and advised the British government on the pandemic.
Farrar said reaching consensus on a definition among experts from all disciplines will allow discussion of issues like ventilation in many different settings, from hospitals to schools.
He compared this to the realization that blood-borne viruses such as HIV or hepatitis B could be spread by physicians not wearing gloves during procedures.
“When I started, medical students, nurses, doctors, none of us wore gloves to take blood,” he told Reuters. “It is now unimaginable that you would not wear gloves. But that happened because everyone agreed on what the issue was, they agreed on the terminology… [The change in practice] Came later.”
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Published: April 18, 2024, 06:23 PM IST
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