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Grab a fork and your favorite dressing: you can eat lettuce again. Today, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) declared the months-long, record-setting, salad-ruining Cyclospora outbreak linked to iceberg lettuce over at last. In the end, nearly 13,000 people in 21 states were sickened by lettuce sold by Taylor Farms. |
What does "over" mean? Contaminated lettuce is no longer being sold or served, and the number of new infections has plummeted. So go ahead and resume your normal nutritional practices. Salad is back on the menu. 🥬 |
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TODAY’S TOPICS |
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QUICK CHAT |
How an indoor-air expert breathes easier at home |
Outdoor air pollution, which can affect heart and lung health, is a common focus for public-health policies. But indoor air can be just as important to our health, since we spend about 90% of our time indoors. |
Scientists are working to understand how to make the air we breathe inside of buildings healthier. I spoke to Brandon Boor, a professor of civil engineering at Purdue University, about how he handles this problem at home. —Veronique Greenwood, Staff Writer |
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. |
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Andrew Merry—Getty Images |
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What factors influence indoor air quality at home? |
There are a variety of sources. In the kitchen, the fuel that you use for cooking can form pollutants that enter the air. There's cleaning products, personal care products, and dust that coats the floor and furniture. You may have mold growing somewhere in your house. |
Some of these pollutants can affect not only our respiratory function, but they can also affect our cognitive function, which is something that is often overlooked. Elevated levels of particulate matter and carbon dioxide can affect our ability to think, learn, and create. |
What's your home like? |
We have multiple portable air purifiers that are running continuously. Not only do they remove particles that may come from our cooking activities, but they remove cat dander, allergens, and dust from the air. |
I have one in the bedroom, providing air purification during sleep. That's important: some of the work I did earlier as a PhD student was on indoor air quality in the bedroom and the sleep environment, and there's a number of pollutant sources there, including the mattress and bedding materials, which can be coated with microbes and allergens that you stir up as you move around in bed. It seems that some more recent research is showing that air quality in the bedroom can have an impact on your sleep quality and your next-day performance. |
Generally, it's good to remove your shoes when you enter the house, which is what I do. It’s something that a lot of people, at least in the U.S., don't really think much about. But it certainly does help, because your shoes can track a lot of outdoor contaminants into the indoor environment. That can include pesticides and road dust that contains all sorts of nasty stuff. |
I also recommend hard flooring to keep the amount of dust to a lower level. I've studied a lot on dust in indoor environments—specifically how infants are exposed to resuspended dust. If you have hard flooring, it's a bit easier to clean compared to carpet. It's harder for dust deposits to build up over time. |
What do you think is the next big thing in indoor air quality? |
The next big thing would be buildings that can protect us from all sorts of indoor and outdoor pollutants and do that autonomously without much human input. I believe that if we can work towards buildings that can sense all these pollutants— biological particles in the air that come from people, or wildfire smoke particles outdoors, or pollen, mold, or certain noxious fumes produced during cooking—and then make real-time adjustments, that will protect people and reduce our exposure in real time. |
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TODAY I LEARNED |
Rabies exposures are rising |
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Rabies is rare in the U.S and other developed countries. But rabies exposures jumped this summer, according to new CDC data. The agency says that from July to August, it received 17% more rabies-related inquiries than it had during the same period the year before. |
Rabies is fatal unless treatment is given before symptoms start. The numbers there, too, reveal an upward trend: usage of this post-exposure treatment is up by 76% compared to last year. —Alana Semuels, Senior Correspondent |
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WHAT WE’RE READING |
The health tolls of 9/11 are still growing, 25 years later. Alice Gainer at CBS New York talks with first responders living with cancers and other Ground Zero-related illnesses. After her insurer rejected her oncologist’s appeals for a milder chemotherapy, Elizabeth Nicholas emailed the company’s CEO, identified herself as a writer, and indicated that she planned to write about her experience. The treatment was approved the next day, she writes in Vanity Fair. Would you pay $200,000 to be frozen after death? Catie McLeod at the Guardian visits a cryonics facility where seven “patients” are waiting for a possible second life.
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