After COVID, WHO defines disease spread 'through air'
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[April 18, 2024]
By Jennifer Rigby
LONDON (Reuters) - The World Health Organization and around 500 experts
have agreed for the first time what it means for a disease to spread
through the air, in a bid to avoid the confusion early in the COVID-19
pandemic that some scientists have said cost lives.
The Geneva-based U.N. health agency released a technical document on the
topic on Thursday. It said it was the first step towards working out how
to better prevent this kind of transmission, both for existing diseases
like measles and for future pandemic threats.
The document concludes that the descriptor "through the air" can be used
for infectious diseases where the main type of transmission involves the
pathogen travelling through the air or being suspended in the air, in
line with other terms such as "waterborne" diseases, which are
understood across disciplines and by the public.
Almost 500 experts contributed to the definition, including physicists,
public health professionals and engineers, many of whom disagreed
bitterly over the topic in the past.
Agencies have historically required high levels of proof before calling
diseases airborne, which required very stringent containment measures;
the new definition says the risk of exposure and severity of disease
should also be considered.
Past disagreements also centred around whether infectious particles were
"droplets" or "aerosols" based on size, which the new definition moves
away from.
During the early days of COVID in 2020, around 200 aerosol scientists
publicly complained that the WHO had failed to warn people of the risk
that the virus could spread through the air. This led to an overemphasis
on measures like handwashing to stop the virus, rather than focusing on
ventilation, they said.
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![](../images/041824PIX/health4.jpg)
The World Health Organisation (WHO) logo is seen near its
headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, February 2, 2023. REUTERS/Denis
Balibouse/File Photo
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2024/Apr/18/images/ads/current/graue_lda_SFARM_2024.png) By July 2020, the agency said there
was "evidence emerging" of airborne spread, but its then chief
scientist Soumya Swaminathan – who began the process to get a
definition – later said the WHO should have been more forceful "much
earlier".
Her successor, Jeremy Farrar, said in an interview that the new
definition was about more than COVID, but he added that at the
beginning of the pandemic there was a lack of evidence available and
experts including the WHO acted in "good faith". At that time, he
was head of the Wellcome Trust charity and advised the British
government on the pandemic.
Farrar said getting the definition agreed among experts from all
disciplines would allow discussions to begin about issues such as
ventilation in many different settings, from hospitals to schools.
He compared it to the realization that blood-borne viruses like HIV
or hepatitis B could be spread by medics not wearing gloves during
procedures.
"When I started out, medical students, nurses, doctors, none of us
wore gloves to take blood," he told Reuters. "Now it is unthinkable
that you wouldn’t wear gloves. But that came because everyone agreed
on what the issue was, they agreed on the terminology… [The change
in practice] came later."
(Reporting by Jennifer Rigby)
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