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REVIEW OF QUANTITATIVE STANDARDS AND GUIDELINES FOR FUNGI IN INDOOR AIR
Citation:
Rao, C., H. Burge, AND J.C S. Chang*. REVIEW OF QUANTITATIVE STANDARDS AND GUIDELINES FOR FUNGI IN INDOOR AIR. JOURNAL OF THE AIR & WASTE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATION 46:899-908, (1996).
Description:
Exposure to fungal aerosols clearly causes human disease. However, methods for assessing exposure remain poorly understood, and guidelines for interpreting data are often contradictory. The purposes of this paper are to review and compare existing guidelines for indoor airborne fungi, to discuss limitations of existing guidelines, and to identify research needs that should contribute to the development of realistic and useful guidelines for these important air pollutants.
Existing guidelines are exclusively based on baseline data (rather than health effects data) and are either absolute (listing numbers) or relative (comparing indoors to outdoors) or a combination of the two. Regulations controlling fungal aerosols have been published only by the Russian Federation. The United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has proposed a standard that is under review. Other guidelines have been proposed or sponsored by North American and European Governmental agencies. Finally, some of the most often quoted guidelines have been proposed by individuals based on either prospective sampling studies or personal experience. Guidelines specify from <100 colony forming units (CFU)/m3 to >1000 CFU/m3 (total fungi) as the upper limit for non-contaminated indoor environments.
Major problems with existing guidelines lie in the lack of connection to human dose/response data, reliance on short term grab samples analyzed only for culture, and the absence of standardized protocols for data collection, analysis, and interpretation. Urgent research needs include the study of human responses to specific fungal agents, development and widespread use of standard protocols using currently available sampling methodologies, and the development of long term, time discriminating, personal samplers that are inexpensive, easy to use, and amenable to straightforward, relevant analysis.