New research suggests that dust can act as a vector to spread respiratory illnesses like COVID-19.
Bill Ristenpart is a professor of chemical engineering at UC Davis who has been studying influenza and how virus particles behave under different conditions for the past several years.
“I think everybody has a good sense of a dusty bookshelf, or they see dusty particles floating around in the air. And what our research has been focusing on is the role of even smaller dust, microscopic dust, that even though it’s too small to see with the naked eye, if it’s contaminated with virus, what our recent research has shown is it can actually transmit influenza virus to susceptible mammalian hosts,” he told KCBS Radio’s “Ask An Expert” segment Friday.
The research suggests that virus particles can settle not just on surfaces and physical objects, but much smaller particles that can be airborne.
Ristenpart’s reseach was conducted on guinea pigs, not human beings, and with influenza, not the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
“They’re both respiratory viral pathogens,” he explained. “They’re biologically extremely different… but they do share a similar feature that they’re about the same size, about 100 nanometers or 0.1 microns in diameter.”
And research suggests that other viruses, like the Hanta virus, can be aerosolized and behave in a similar matter.
Ristenpart and his colleagues also found that the influenza virus can survive in dust for multiple days, in some cases as many as four days depending on the temperature and humidity.
“Colder temperatures and drier air tend to make the virus live longer, and so that has implications for indoor spread,” said Ristenpart of the flu. Sunlight, on the other hand, makes influenza die off more quickly.
“That same mechanism - that you can have virus-contaminated microscopic dust particles transmit the flu in guinea pigs - that really raises concerns about whether that can be possible for other respiratory viruses including the virus responsible for COVID-19,” said Ristenpart.
So while this behavior has not been confirmed in the novel coronavirus, lessons learned about influenza and other pathogens could raise new questions about how COVID-19 spreads and open new avenues of study.
