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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Fungi are a group microbes, that are found with particular incidence in the indoor environment. Their direct toxicity or capability of generating toxic compounds has been associated with a large number of adverse health effects, such as infectious diseases, allergies and other toxic effects. Given that in modern society people spend a large part of their time indoors; fungal communities’ characterization of this environmental compartment assumes paramount importance in the comprehension of health effects. House dust is an easy to obtain, time-integrative matrix, being its use in epidemiological studies on human exposure to environmental contaminants highly recommended. Furthermore, dust can carry a great variety of fungal content that undergoes a large number of processes that modulate and further complexify human exposure. Our study aims to quantify and identify the fungal community on house dust samples collected using two different methodologies (an approach not often seen in the literature): active (vacuum cleaner bags) and passive sampling (dust settled in petri dishes). Sampling was performed as part of the ongoing 6x60x6 Project in which six houses from Covilhã (Portugal), with building dates representative of six decades, were studied for a period of sixty days.
Description
Keywords
Indoor environmental quality Fungi House dust
Citation
Raquel Amaro, Sónia D. Coelho; M. Ramiro Pastorinho, Luís Taborda-Barata, Maria Assunção Vaz-Patto, Marisa Monteiro, Miguel Nepomuceno, João C.G. Lanzinha, João Paulo Teixeira, Cristiana C. Pereira, Ana C.A. Sousa, House dust fungal communities’ characterization: a double take on the six by sixty by six project (6x60x6), International Conference on Engineering: Engineering for Society (ICEUBI2015), Covilhã, Portugal, Dec. (2015). ISBN:978-989-654-261-0.