'Sick' buildings find their cure.Johns Hopkins Noun 1. Johns Hopkins - United States financier and philanthropist who left money to found the university and hospital that bear his name in Baltimore (1795-1873) Hopkins 2. University's Applied Physics Laboratory The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), located in Laurel, Maryland, is a not-for-profit, university-affiliated research center employing 4,000 people. has licensed a system that can destroy airborne biological agents as they move through a building's heating and air conditioning air conditioning, mechanical process for controlling the humidity, temperature, cleanliness, and circulation of air in buildings and rooms. Indoor air is conditioned and regulated to maintain the temperature-humidity ratio that is most comfortable and healthful. ducts. The system sterilizes "sick," buildings, airplanes and cruise ships by neutralizing and destroys pathogens as they pass through a building's ventilation system ventilation system Public health An air system designed to maintain negative pressure and exhaust air properly, to minimize the spread of TB and other respiratory pathogens in a health care facility . The technology has passed proof-of-concept tests that involved retrofitting the system into existing heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems. The system works without any special filtering that might impede airflow, according to Johns Hopkins. "We're seeing that the technology can be easily scaled up to handle real-world environments," said Richard Potember, the project manager at APL's Research and Technology Development Center. The Bio-Defense Research Group, Inc., in Upper Marlboro, Md. will build this technology "The Bio-Defense Research Group will take the research from APL's prototype stage and scale it up to a system that works as effectively in commercial-size buildings," said Potember. Prime candidates for such a system are hospitals, where it could knock out staph staph n. Staphylococcus. staph adj. and other infections. |
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