My first blog post about water and air quality in the in the built environment in the post antibiotic era.

I am discussing the present, not the future, we are now in the age of antibiotic resistance. The World Health Organization and CDC have rated antibiotic resistance a serious threat to global health.

Air quality, heating cooling humidity and ventilation  

My doctors consulting offices are air conditioned for comfort. This also means that someone sick with a communicable and even fatal respiratory infection comes into the practice sneezes and the air conditioning system can share it to everyone in the practice. I find this ironic, if we were an intelligent sustainable society this would be illegal.  Hydronic heating (hot water radiators) and cooling (cooling radiators in the ceiling) in building that the sick are supported or any public building would be the only system approved. Fresh air would be delivered to each room and removed from each room separately. Hydronic heating and cooling can be more expensive to install but the reduced risk of bacteria, dust, pollen and other allergen distribution makes it an ideal choice for a healthy environmentally aware building. The passive solar design argument is somewhat flawed by the lack of sufficient and regular ventilation.

Water quality

We treat sewage and many swimming pools with Chlorine, then naively or stupidly expect to deliver bacteria free drinking water by treating it with chlorine. I argue that we are creating human specific Chlorine resistant bacteria in the first two uses and then distributing this bacteria in the water supply. The water supply as I see it, needs to go back to individual tanks at the dwelling this enables rainwater to be collected but also enables the use of probiotics to treat water. Regular cleaning of tanks is a necessity and should be mandatory on public buildings. Probiotics as I see are the way of today now not the future, as once we lose Chlorine we don’t have an easy alternative we should save the use Chlorine for emergency situations.

Solar hot water systems in their current design add to this issue as they don’t regularly and automatically thermally inoculate legionella bacteria. Legionella pneumophila inhalation can be fatal, it had 100% mortality rate when used as a biological weapon. Unfortunately many environmentalists and greens see themselves above this science, and don’t boost at all, or only boost to shower temperature which is ideal for legionella bacteria. A solar hot water controller could maintain bacteria free hot water, boost out of peak electricity demand times and even boost using renewable energy when available.

So when it hits the fan, the way things are this will be really bad, and it might even splatter. We have an emergency service for storms etc, a fire brigade for fire but no organization is set up to deal with a pandemic. As a plumber I have had no training to deal this, I might even help to cause or spread it.

We know its coming.

We should get prepared, or at least start a discussion.

John