Can we clean Covid from the air around us?
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Nina Notman talks to the experts about what is needed to remove pollutants and even infectious diseases from the air inside our homes, schools and offices
‘The very first canon of nursing, the first and last thing upon which a nurse’s attention must be fixed… is this: to keep the air that he breathes as pure as the external air, without chilling him. Yet what is so little attended to? Even when it is thought about at all, the most extraordinary misconceptions reign about it.’
These are Florence Nightingale’s opening words in the first chapter of her 1859 book Notes on Nursing, and she goes on to bemoan the reluctance to open windows and doors, both in hospitals and at home, for half a dozen more pages. Would she be surprised to learn that, over 160 years later, this same aversion persists?
