McIlvaine Coronavirus Market Ale

Masks will be Needed to Cope with PM from Road Traffic Tire Wear

Mask Wearing Should be Coordinated with Ambient Air Pollution Levels but We Have to Scrutinize the Definitions

Don’t Confuse Medical with Public Health Guidance

Mask and Filter Protection are Part of a Swiss Cheese Defense Program

OECD has just issued a report predicting that wear and tear from brakes, tires and road surfaces will soon overtake car exhaust fumes as the leading source of fine particles released into the air by road traffic, according to a new OECD report. Heavy electric vehicles with long-distance batteries could compound the problem even as they slash emissions from engine exhaust.

The findings in Non-exhaust Particulate Emissions from Road Transport: An ignored Environmental Policy Challenge suggest that electric vehicles should not be exempted from tolls and congestion charges aimed at reducing road traffic emissions. Instead, road traffic regulations should consider both exhaust and “non-exhaust” emissions from all vehicles and should take into account factors like vehicle weight and tire composition. Policy makers should also favor measures that reduce driving distances, limit urban vehicle access and encourage public transport, walking and cycling.

Exposure to airborne particulate matter (PM) is associated with acute respiratory infections, lung cancer, and chronic respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. Road traffic is behind a quarter of PM2.5, the most damaging type, in urban areas yet only exhaust emissions of PM are regulated. No standards exist for measuring or regulating non-exhaust PM emissions.

As particulate matter emitted from exhaust sources decreases with the uptake of electric vehicles, the majority of PM released into the air by road traffic could come from non-exhaust sources as early as 2035.

The amount of non-exhaust particulate matter a vehicle emits is determined by many factors, including vehicle weight, driving styles, the material composition of brakes, tires and roads, and the amount of dust on road surfaces. Lightweight electric vehicles with a driving range of about 100 miles (161 km) emit an estimated 11-13% less PM2.5 than conventional vehicles in the same segment. However, heavier electric vehicles with battery packs enabling a range of 300 miles (483 km) emit an estimated 3-8% more PM2.5 than equivalent conventional vehicles.

The report finds that the total amount of non-exhaust particulate matter emitted by passenger vehicles worldwide is likely to rise by 53.5% by 2030.

These findings underline the need to establish standardised approaches to measuring non-exhaust particulate matter and to develop a better understanding of how factors like vehicle characteristics influence the amount of PM generated, the report says.

For further information journalists are invited to contact Catherine Bremer in the OECD Media Office (+33 1 45 24 80 97).

Mask Wearing Should be Coordinated with Ambient Air Pollution Levels but We Have to Scrutinize the Definitions

The definitions of air pollutant quantities are based on tradition and are often not the most accurate selections. Sensor based ambient air monitors are less costly than analyzers or permanent samplers but there has been question about their accuracy. Dubai solved this problem with a mobile EPA qualified analyzer system and 14 sensor-based systems. China has installed 10,000 Sail Hero sensor-based systems that correlate closely with analyzers for each of the major pollutants. The regulations relative to toxic metals require polluters only to limit PM_2.5 which is used as surrogate for toxic metals. This is despite the fact that some metals are 100,000 times more toxic than others. This is despite the fact that the employment of multi metals analyzers in a St. Louis ambient monitoring program showed that levels of certain highly toxic metals varied depending on the wind direction.

As a St Louis citizen you felt safe not wearing a mask outside when PM 2.5 levels were low. However, a lead smelter south west of the City transmits dangerous levels of lead to the city when the wind is blowing at certain speeds and direction. It only takes a tiny fraction of lead in the PM 2.5 to make inhalation risky.

Opacity is still used for regulatory purposes. Its origin was long before scrubbers were employed after the particulate collector. In most cases scrubbers provide additional particulate removal but, in some cases, when they malfunction, they increase particulate discharges. But believe it or not opacity regulations require measurement prior to the scrubber since opacity cannot be measured in a wet stack.

Power plants and other combustion sources are required to limit their emissions of gas phase mercury. This is based on the fact that prior to attempted control mercury is in the gas phase. However, when activated carbon is injected, the mercury becomes attached to particles. If these particles are not captured, they can fall in the vicinity of the plant. In contrast gas phase mercury may travel across continents. It is therefore possible that mercury control could result in greater mercury contamination near the source than if there were no controls. Permanent samplers will capture particulate mercury but can be modified to segment the particulate and gas phase. The Cooper mercury analyzer also measures total mercury. Doesn’t it make sense to regulate total mercury?

The fundamental principles are also murky. Particulate is defined as the diameter of a sphere and the particle weight is assumed. In fact, particles are not spheres and their specific gravity varies. The cascade impactor is used to determine particle size. But it creates its own definition which does not magically transform hair shaped particles into spheres of equal gravity.

The McIlvaine Company identified this problem relative to the sizing of wet high energy particulate scrubbers based on particle size. Purchasers who relied on particle size analyses in many cases experienced disastrous results. McIlvaine addressed this problem with the invention of the McIlvaine mini scrubber. It is a 1 CFM device where the energy in the turbulent zone can be varied and the results determined in mg/m³.

The impact of ambient particulate could be addressed in a similar manner. A miniature lung equivalent could be used to determine how much penetrates and how much is captured on the surface. It is likely that cascade impactor measured particles of 2.5-micron diameter penetrate differently. So, the new definition would be particles which penetrate the lungs vs those which do not.

EPA standards for ambient measurement of pollutants have been adopted around the world. But when China and Dubai use methods which may be equally indicative even if they don’t correlate 100% with EPA methods, there is eventually going to be a movement toward a new standard.

Toxic metals need to also be addressed. The concern is not only the particle penetration aspect but the toxicity. There are now multi metals analyzers which can measure the concentration of 17 different metals. So, the lung penetration index could also be adjusted based a toxic metal harm quotient. In St. Louis when winds blow from the south, consistent with the bearing of the Doe Run Herculaneum lead smelter the toxic metal harm index is likely to be much higher than would be reflected by PM_2.5 measurement. McIlvaine has long promoted the use of a toxic metal harm metric which would consider the relative contribution of each metal. This would be of more benefit to St Louis citizens. This common metric can be expanded to all pollutants and be a much better guide as to whether to remain indoors. This is explained at Sustainability Universal Rating System.

Your air, your style, and you. Breathe in healthy and clean air with Purar, where the useful is separated from the harmful particles by providing all with comfortable, highly functional, and appealing face masks, while never compromising on personal style.

Having experienced Shanghai China’s long season of air pollution first hand, Purar’s co-founder, Jasmine/Xiaohua Meng, found that wearing a mask was the only way to protect yourself. As a daily mask user, she experienced the discomfort of wearing standard surgical facemasks, which make breathing harder from increased humidity, fogs up glasses, and can irritate the wearer.

With the question in mind of finding a highly protective, comfortable, and stylish alternative, Jasmine delivered the pitch to her employer, Mann+Hummel, which makes most of its billions annually from industrial air filter manufacturing; conventional car filters, to be specific. Headquartered near Stuttgart, Germany, Mann+Hummel has been looking for alternative directions to pivot into, given that the conventional car market is changing dramatically. So a few years ago, Mann+Hummel launched a startup contest called InCube, the winning idea gets you six months at a startup incubator, Plug and Play Tech Center, in California.

Purar emerged as a winning product for the 2019 contest and was formally launched in the Plug and Play’s Acceleration program in Silicon Valley, with a global team of developers working to create a mask that not only works well, but also feels like a seamless part of our wearers.

Derived from the words “Pure Air”, the facemasks are engineered by the filtration experts at Mann+Hummel to achieve the KN95’s filtration level, giving it the ability to filter more than 95% of the 0.3 micron particles. Besides being certified for KN95 standards, Purar facemasks has also passed the leakage test according to GB2626-2019.

In terms of the design, the reusable facemask includes a filter that can be replaced and a sustainable outer shell which is washable. The washable shell is crafted with an ergonomic design that is configured carefully with polygons for fitting comfortably according to your face shape. An additional feature of the mask is the neck grip that does not hurt your ears as much as ear-looped mask. This neck grip provides more convenience for wearers who use wire or wireless audio device such as headphone or AirPods or even female wearers who accessorize their ears with large chunky earrings. For those who wear glasses, the mask comes with a pre-formed nose support that helps prevent glass-fogging issues.

Each mask is available in 2 sizes (size S and L) and includes 6 stylish colors: Blue, Black, Burgundy, Grey, Pink and Mauve. A box of mask retails at USD49 and comprises of a mask shell, 2 replaceable filters (Protect Plus and Lite Comfort) and a travel pouch. Protect Plus filter is tested and certified for standard that similar to American N95 (GB2626-2019, certification KN95) to provide full protection. Whilst Lite Comfort filter provides higher air permeability than Protect Plus to provide more comfort and breathability.

Purar mask is available in 6 stylish colors: Blue, Black, Burgundy, Grey, Pink and Mauve

Purar does not stop at just offering a highly fashionable facemask to end-consumers, it goes beyond this by also offering customizable mask for B2B corporate needs. After all, Purar’s mission is to provide people with a comfortable and fashionable accessory by leveraging the creativity of young designers to enable them to breathe cleaner air.

Michael Mina of Harvard says it is important to distinguish medical from public health guidance. This is good advice. In fact it is important to also distinguish guidance for vaccine manufacture.

It is also desirable to distinguish between sub segments. The guidance for personnel entering an isolation unit are far different than for a person at the registration desk in a hospital.

Application	Filtration Efficiency %
Medical
Registration	90
Non infectious	95
Infectious	99.99
Pharmacy	99.99
Vaccine Mfg.
Fill and finish	99.999
Adjacencies	99.9
Public High Positivity Zone
Open Parks	60
City Streets	90
Elevators	95
Subways	99

The efficiency needs can be achieved with a combination of filters and masks. If there are filter cubes on the city streets at intersections the need for more efficient masks is less. If the elevator has a HEPA filter and laminar air flow there is less of a burden on the mask. This combination of filters can be conceived as the swiss cheese defense program as explained below.

This concept was the basis of an article by Siobhan Roberts published Dec. 5, 2020 in the NY Times.

Lately, in the ongoing conversation about how to defeat the coronavirus, experts have made reference to the “Swiss cheese model” of pandemic defense.

The metaphor is easy enough to grasp: Multiple layers of protection, imagined as cheese slices, block the spread of the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. No one layer is perfect; each has holes, and when the holes align, the risk of infection increases. But several layers combined — social distancing, plus masks, plus hand-washing, plus testing and tracing, plus ventilation, plus government messaging — significantly reduce the overall risk. Vaccination will add one more protective layer.

“Pretty soon you’ve created an impenetrable barrier, and you really can quench the transmission of the virus,” said Dr. Julie Gerberding, executive vice president and chief patient officer at Merck, who recently referenced the Swiss cheese model when speaking at a virtual gala fund-raiser for MoMath, the National Museum of Mathematics in Manhattan.

“But it requires all of those things, not just one of those things,” she added. “I think that’s what our population is having trouble getting their head around. We want to believe that there is going to come this magic day when suddenly 300 million doses of vaccine will be available and we can go back to work and things will return to normal. That is absolutely not going to happen fast.”

Rather, Dr. Gerberding said in a follow-up email, expect to see “a gradual improvement in protection, first among the highest need groups, and then more gradually among the rest of us.” Until vaccines are widely available and taken, she said, “we will need to continue masks and other common-sense measures to protect ourselves and others.”

In October, Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, retweeted an infographic rendering of the Swiss cheese model, noting that it included “things that are personal *and* collective responsibility — note the ‘misinformation mouse’ busy eating new holes for the virus to pass through.”

“One of the first principles of pandemic response is, or ought to be, clear and consistent messaging from trusted sources,” Dr. Hanage said in an email. “Unfortunately the independence of established authorities like the C.D.C. has been called into question, and trust needs to be rebuilt as a matter of urgency.” A catchy infographic is a powerful message, he said, but ultimately requires higher-level support.

The Swiss cheese concept originated with James T. Reason, a cognitive psychologist, now a professor emeritus at the University of Manchester, England, in his 1990 book, “Human Error.” A succession of disasters including the Challenger shuttle explosion, Bhopal and Chernobyl — motivated the concept, and it became known as the “Swiss cheese model of accidents,” with the holes in the cheese slices representing errors that accumulate and lead to adverse events.

The model has been widely used by safety analysts in various industries, including medicine and aviation, for many years. (Dr. Reason did not devise the “Swiss cheese” label; that is attributed to Rob Lee, an Australian air-safety expert, in the 1990s.) The model became famous, but it was not accepted uncritically; Dr. Reason himself noted that it had limitations and was intended as a generic tool or guide. In 2004, at a workshop addressing an aviation accident two years earlier near Überlingen, Germany, he delivered a talk with the title, “Überlingen: Is Swiss cheese past its sell-by date?”

In 2006, a review of the model, published by the Eurocontrol Experimental Center, recounted that Dr. Reason, while writing the book chapter “Latent errors and system disasters,” in which an early version of the model appears, was guided by two notions: “the biological or medical metaphor of pathogens, and the central role played by defenses, barriers, controls and safeguards (analogous to the body’s autoimmune system).”

The cheese metaphor now pairs fairly well with the coronavirus pandemic. Ian M. Mackay, a virologist at the University of Queensland, in Brisbane, Australia, saw a smaller version on Twitter, but thought that it could do with more slices, more information. He created, with collaborators, the “Swiss Cheese Respiratory Pandemic Defense” and engaged his Twitter community, asking for feedback and putting the visualization through many iterations. “Community engagement is very high!” he said. Now circulating widely, the infographic has been translated into more than two dozen languages.

“This multilayered approach to reducing risk is used in many industries, especially those where failure could be catastrophic,” Dr. Mackay said, via email. “Death is catastrophic to families, and for loved ones, so I thought Professor Reason’s approach fit in very well during the circulation of a brand-new, occasionally hidden, sometimes severe and occasionally deadly respiratory virus.”

The following is an edited version of a recent email conversation with Dr. Mackay by the Washington Post.

A. The real power of this infographic — and James Reason’s approach to account for human fallibility — is that it’s not really about any single layer of protection or the order of them, but about the additive success of using multiple layers, or cheese slices. Each slice has holes or failings, and those holes can change in number and size and location, depending on how we behave in response to each intervention.

Take masks as one example of a layer. Any mask will reduce the risk that you will unknowingly infect those around you, or that you will inhale enough virus to become infected. But it will be less effective at protecting you and others if it doesn’t fit well, if you wear it below your nose, if it’s only a single piece of cloth, if the cloth is a loose weave, if it has an unfiltered valve, if you don’t dispose of it properly, if you don’t wash it, or if you don’t sanitize your hands after you touch it. Each of these are examples of a hole. And that’s in just one layer.

To be as safe as possible, and to keep those around you safe, it’s important to use more slices to prevent those volatile holes from aligning and letting virus through.

A. Distance is the most effective intervention; the virus doesn’t have legs, so if you are physically distant from people, you avoid direct contact and droplets. Then you have to consider inside spaces, which are especially in play during winter or in hotter countries during summer: the bus, the gym, the office, the bar or the restaurant. That’s because we know SARS-CoV-2 can remain infectious in aerosols (small floaty droplets) and we know that aerosol spread explains Covid-19 superspreading events. Try not to be in those spaces with others, but if you have to be, minimize your time there (work from home if you can) and wear a mask. Don’t go grocery shopping as often. Hold off on going out, parties, gatherings. You can do these things later.

A. The misinformation mouse can erode any of those layers. People who are uncertain about an intervention may be swayed by a loud and confident-sounding voice proclaiming that a particular layer is ineffective. Usually, that voice is not an expert on the subject at all. When you look to the experts — usually to your local public health authorities or the World Health Organization — you’ll find reliable information.

An effect doesn’t have to be perfect to reduce your risk and the risk to those around you. We need to remember that we’re all part of a society, and if we each do our part, we can keep each other safer, which pays off for us as well.

Another example: We look both ways for oncoming traffic before crossing a road. This reduces our risk of being hit by a car but doesn’t reduce it to zero. A speeding car could still come out of nowhere. But if we also cross with the lights, and keep looking as we walk, and don’t stare at our phone, we drastically reduce our risk of being hit.

We’re already used to doing that. When we listen to the loud nonexperts who have no experience in protecting our health and safety, we are inviting them to have an impact in our lives. That’s not a risk we should take. We just need to get used to these new risk-reduction steps for today’s new risk — a respiratory virus pandemic, instead of a car.

A. We each need to do our part: stay apart from others, wear a mask when we can’t, think about our surroundings, for example. But we can also expect our leadership to be working to create the circumstances for us to be safe — like regulations about the air exchange inside public spaces, creating quarantine and isolation premises, communicating specifically with us (not just at us), limiting border travel, pushing us to keep getting our health checks, and providing mental health or financial support for those who suffer or can’t get paid while in a lockdown.

A. We each use these approaches in everyday life. But for the pandemic, this all feels new and like a lot of extra work. Because everything is new. In the end, though, we’re just forming new habits. Like navigating our latest phone’s operating system or learning how to play that new console game I got for my birthday. It might take some time to get across it all, but it’s worthwhile. In working together to reduce the risk of infection, we can save lives and improve health.

And as a bonus, the multilayered risk reduction approach can even decrease the number of times we get the flu or a bad chest cold. Also, sometimes slices sit under a mandate — it’s important we also abide by those rules and do what the experts think we should. They’re looking out for our health.