Akshay Kale and P Gursumeeran Satsangi of SPPU chemistry department carried out the study that was published in the journal Aerobiologia. They sampled air at a residential home in Pashan over six months
They sampled air at a residential home in Pashan over six months — Jan-June 2022 — using a six-stage cascade impactor that separated airborne bacteria and fungi by particle size. Indoor and outdoor readings were taken across winter and summer, with 24 sampling runs and 144 plates analysed. Pune: Researchers from Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU) have conducted a single site study and observed indoor bacterial aerosol levels well above international residential guidelines. It is one of the first size-resolved baseline pictures of household bioaerosol exposure in an Indian city. Akshay Kale and P Gursumeeran Satsangi of SPPU chemistry department carried out the study that was published in the journal Aerobiologia. They ran the calculation separately for children and adults, since kids breathed differently and were exposed differently over time. That’s how they arrived at the finding that nose-breathing kept a lot more of the bacteria out of a child’s deep lungs compared to mouth-breathing. Despite the elevated raw bacterial counts, the study’s calculated hazard index — a standard risk-screening metric that factored in exposure time, breathing rate and other variables — stayed below one for both bacteria and fungi, indoors and outdoors, across both seasons. The study is based on a single house in one Pune neighbourhood over a one six-month cycle. It relied on culture-based counting methods that don’t capture non-culturable organisms — limitations the researchers themselves flagged. They have called it a baseline data set that can inform future, broader indoor air quality research and residential guidelines, rather than a conclusive risk assessment on its own.