A performance assessment of airborne infection isolation rooms

Removal of exhaled particles by ventilation and deposition in a multibed airborne infection isolation room

“…Fine droplet nuclei are believed to be the transmission vector for airborne diseases, while large droplets are responsible in droplet-borne diseases. There have been many studies on the performance of ventilation systems in isolation rooms since the SARS outbreak, such as evaluation of the ventilation performance in isolation rooms by field measurement (Li et al, 2007;Saravia et al, 2007), numerical investigation of ventilation performance for removing contaminants (Kao and Yang, 2006;Lai and Cheng, 2007;Shih et al, 2007) and laboratory experimental studies (Qian et al, 2006;Tung et al, 2009). Our previous studies showed that the so-called downward ventilation could not produce a ÔlaminarÕ flow as expected to push down respiratory gaseous contaminants to floor level and remove them from floor-level exhausts (Qian et al, 2006).…”

Experimental Study on Displacement and Mixing Ventilation Systems for a Patient Ward

“…It is not easy to design hospital ward with good ventilation. Li et al (2007a) found only 97% of the new isolation rooms built in Hong Kong meet the design criteria and Saravia et al (2007) found the situation is much worse in the USA with only 32% of the isolation rooms meeting the design criteria. If not properly designed and maintained, ventilation system could be a source of contamination in hospitals ).…”

Measurement of ventilation and airborne infection risk in large naturally ventilated hospital wards

“…Despite this, much of the evidence relating infection risk to hospital ventilation is derived from investigations of controlled, mechanically ventilated environments such as operating theatres [28][29][30][31][32], isolation rooms [10,[33][34][35][36] and idealized studies conducted in test-chamber environments. The latter predominately use gas tracers to explore cross-infection risk between patients under different ventilation regimes [17,18,37] although recent studies have used bioaerosol tracers to generate the required airborne concentration distribution within a room [26] and spatial deposition of airborne particles in single and two-bed idealized patient rooms [38].…”