TY - JOUR
T1 - Influenza transmission in the guinea pig model is insensitive to the ventilation airflow speed
T2 - Evidence for the role of aerosolized fomites
AU - Asadi, Sima
AU - Gaaloul Ben Hnia, Nassima
AU - Barre, Ramya S.
AU - Wexler, Anthony S.
AU - Ristenpart, William D.
AU - Bouvier, Nicole M.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.
PY - 2023/4
Y1 - 2023/4
N2 - Recent experimental work in a guinea pig model has established that influenza A virus is transmissible through the air via aerosolized fomites, which are microscopic dust and dander particulates contaminated with infectious virus [S. Asadi, Nat. Commun. 11, 4062 (2020)10.1038/s41467-020-17888-w]. Here we report that influenza A transmits efficiently from intranasally inoculated animals to downwind susceptible animals over a wide range of ventilation airspeeds with no statistically significant change in transmission probability despite increasing the airspeed by a factor of ten. We demonstrate that this finding is inconsistent with a transmission mechanism predicated entirely on emission of virus-laden expiratory particles from the inoculated animal, since the resulting airborne viral concentrations should be greatly diluted at larger airspeeds. Instead, the results suggest that the overall rate of virus aerosolization increases with the ventilation airspeed, in accord with a transmission mechanism predicated on aerosolized fomites in which their generation rate is proportional to the airspeed.
AB - Recent experimental work in a guinea pig model has established that influenza A virus is transmissible through the air via aerosolized fomites, which are microscopic dust and dander particulates contaminated with infectious virus [S. Asadi, Nat. Commun. 11, 4062 (2020)10.1038/s41467-020-17888-w]. Here we report that influenza A transmits efficiently from intranasally inoculated animals to downwind susceptible animals over a wide range of ventilation airspeeds with no statistically significant change in transmission probability despite increasing the airspeed by a factor of ten. We demonstrate that this finding is inconsistent with a transmission mechanism predicated entirely on emission of virus-laden expiratory particles from the inoculated animal, since the resulting airborne viral concentrations should be greatly diluted at larger airspeeds. Instead, the results suggest that the overall rate of virus aerosolization increases with the ventilation airspeed, in accord with a transmission mechanism predicated on aerosolized fomites in which their generation rate is proportional to the airspeed.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85153866971
U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevFluids.8.040502
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevFluids.8.040502
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85153866971
SN - 2469-990X
VL - 8
JO - Physical Review Fluids
JF - Physical Review Fluids
IS - 4
M1 - 040502
ER -