Masks are now optional for passengers and visitors at Gerald R. Ford International Airport following a federal court ruling and announcement that the Transportation Security Administration will no longer require mask use.  

A federal district judge in Florida on Monday struck down federal mask requirements on planes, trains, buses and other public transportation. Since then, airports across the country as well as major airlines such as Delta and American Airlines have shed their mask mandates.

Effective immediately, masks are optional at Gerald R. Ford International Airport for all employees, passengers and guests, according to airport officials. 

The airport encourages all travelers to make the best decision for their health, said Haley Abbas, marketing and communications manager at the airport. 

The airport encourages travelers to check with their airline carrier regarding their specific mask mandates. Masks will still be available at terminal entrances for those who choose to wear one, Abbas said. 

“We’ll continue to monitor this rapidly evolving situation and communicate any updates on federal requirements and public health guidance as they occur,” Abbas said in a statement to MiBiz. 

U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle said the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s mask requirement exceeded the agency’s authority. Biden administration officials have said the CDC’s order is no longer in effect pending a legal review.

In July 2020, the Grand Rapids airport launched a “Fly Safe. Fly Ford.” campaign highlighting what officials at the time anticipated would be long-term changes at the airport, such as continuous cleaning protocols, limiting contact between travelers and employees, and installing new HVAC equipment to improve indoor air quality.

In December 2021, airport President and CEO Tory Richardson told MiBiz that passenger travel had rebounded to about 80 percent of pre-pandemic levels, driven primarily by leisure travelers.

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Scientists have identified a mechanism that explains how fine air pollution particles might cause lung cancer, according to a study published today in eLife.

The findings could lead to new approaches for preventing or treating the initial lung changes that lead to the disease.

Tiny, inhalable fine particulate matter (FPM) found in air pollutants has been recognised as a Group 1 carcinogen and a substantial threat to global health. However, the cancer-causing mechanism of FPM remains unclear.

“Despite its potential to cause mutations, recent research suggests that FPM does not directly promote — and may even inhibit — the growth of lung cancer cells,” explains first author Zhenzhen Wang, an associate researcher at Nanjing University (NJU), Nanjing, China, who carried out the study between labs at NJU and the University of Macau where she was sponsored by a University of Macau Fellowship. “This suggests that FPM might lead to cancer through indirect means that support tumour growth. For example, some studies suggest FPM can prevent immune cells from moving to where they are needed.”

To explore this possibility, Wang and the team collected FPM from seven locations in China and studied its effects on the main immune cells that defend against tumour growth — called cytotoxic T-cells (CTLs). In mice administered with lung cancer cells that were not exposed to FPM, CTLs were recruited to the lung to destroy the tumour cells. By contrast, in the mice whose lungs were exposed to FPM, the infiltration of CTLs was delayed — potentially allowing the tumour cells to establish in lung tissue.

To investigate why the CTLs did not enter the lung as quickly in the FPM-exposed lungs, the team studied both the CTLs themselves and the lung tissue structure. They found that CTLs exposed to FPM still retained their migratory ability, but that FPM exposure dramatically compressed the lung tissue structure and the spaces that immune cells move between. There were also much higher levels of collagen — a protein that provides biomechanical support for cells and tissues. When the team studied the movement of CTLs in the mice, in lung tissue exposed to FPM, CTLs struggled to move, whereas those in the untreated tissue were able to move freely.

Further analysis of the tissue showed that the structural changes were caused by increases in a collagen subtype called collagen IV, but the team still did not know how FPM triggered this. They found the answer when they looked more closely at the structural changes to collagen IV and the enzyme responsible for making them — called peroxidasin. This enzyme drives a specific type of cross-linking that exposure to FPM was found to cause and aggravate in the lung tissue.

“The most surprising find was the mechanism by which this process occurred,” Wang says. “The peroxidasin enzyme stuck to the FPM in the lung, which increased its activity. Taken together, this means that wherever FPM lands in the lung, increased peroxidasin activity leads to structural changes in the lung tissue that can keep immune cells out and away from growing tumour cells.”

“Our study reveals a completely new mechanism by which inhaled fine particles promote lung tumour development,” concludes senior author Lei Dong, Professor at the School of Life Sciences, Nanjing University. “We provide direct evidence that proteins that stick to fine particulate matter can cause a significant and adverse effect, giving rise to pathogenic activity. Our discovery that peroxidasin is the mediator of this effect in lung tissue identifies it as a specific and unexpected target for preventing lung disease caused by air pollution.”

Story Source:

Materials provided by eLife. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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Protecting Jobsites and Facilities with Less Worker Downtime

DALLAS, TX / ACCESSWIRE / April 19, 2022 / ActivePure, the global leader in surface and air purification, today announced a partnership with Compass Datacenters. Compass will work in conjunction with ActivePure authorized distributor Workplace Elemental Technologies (WET) to implement advanced air purification measures at their jobsites and select facilities. The installation of ActivePure Technology sets a new precedent for those in the data center industry. Devices powered by ActivePure Technology are to be installed in common indoor facilities, Compass corporate offices, construction sites and office areas in company-maintained facilities. Compass will also make ActivePure Technology available for customers to use in their commissioned data center facilities to reduce airborne and surface pathogens in their operations and maintenance spaces.

With origins in the space exploration program, ActivePure has successfully adapted naturally occurring outdoors processes for indoor environments. ActivePure Technology is an Advanced Photocatalysis technology which mimics the organic process of photolysis – in this process, the air is cleansed when sunlight interacts with moisture and creates oxidative molecules. ActivePure brings this atmospheric cleansing phenomenon indoors, allowing the oxidizing particles to neutralize viruses, mold and bacteria in the air and on surfaces. This unique technology is a game-changer as it actively neutralizes surface and airborne pathogens (including SARS-CoV-2) without chemicals, ozone or the need to trap and filter contaminants.

“Everyone who has worked in construction knows that aside from terrible weather, nothing has a more negative scheduling impact than communicable airborne illnesses among construction crews. With ActivePure Technology, we can now proactively protect our teams to ensure we honor the commitments we make to our customers,” said Nancy Novak, chief innovation officer at Compass Datacenters. “It helps make our worksites far healthier, which has a huge impact on delivering facilities on time and budget. This technology also helps protect our employees who work in office environments, allowing everyone to feel safer working and collaborating in person. ActivePure has become a vital part of Compass’ comprehensive approach to health and safety across our organization.”

Since the inception of the initiative, Compass Datacenters, has successfully installed units powered by ActivePure Technology in construction sites and data centers throughout their United States and Canada properties. The devices installed include the Beyond Guardian Air, Mid-Range Blaster, Pure Cloud, and AP500.

“This collaboration with Compass has been a very successful one, and it demonstrates how important indoor air quality is for the data center and construction industries,” said Jim Levin, founder of Workplace Elemental Technologies. “Construction sites, corporate offices and operational data centers are all environments where many people are working in close proximity. By using ActivePure, Compass is providing a critical layer of protection in their data center construction and operations environments. This is a model for how the data center industry can provide peace of mind and greater productivity in the workplace.”

For more information on how ActivePure provides a trusted air and surface purification solution, visit ActivePure.com or call 888-217-4316.

About ActivePure
Privately held ActivePure has been the global leader in active, continuous surface and air disinfection systems for healthcare and educational institutions, commercial and public facilities, hospitality and residential applications since 1924. Patented ActivePure Technology has been proven in independent university and laboratory testing to effectively control and neutralize indoor contaminants. It is the only product in its class recognized by the Space Foundation as Certified Space Technology and inducted into the Space Foundation Hall of Fame. ActivePure was developed for use in space exploration and has since evolved for use in commercial and consumer products used to reduce exposure to pathogens, including RNA and DNA viruses, bacteria and molds, by up to 99.9% in the air and on surfaces. ActivePure has been committed to providing quality products and technologies to create safe and clean indoor environments worldwide since 1924. ActivePure Technologies’ six brands include Aerus, Aerus Enterprise Solutions, ActivePure, Allergy Buyers Club, The Pure Company and Vollara. For more information, please visit ActivePure.com or call 888-217-4316.

About Compass Datacenters
Compass makes lives better by providing the world’s technology leaders a secure place to plug in wherever they grow. We provide custom, move-in ready data centers from edge deployments to core facilities serving hyperscale, cloud and enterprise customers. Since our inception, we have embraced sustainability with the efficient use of land, green energy, water free cooling and building materials. Our campus approach empowers customers with easily scalable capacity, high levels of control and ultimate flexibility with the long-term perspective and financial strength of private investors, RedBird Capital Partners, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and the Azrieli Group. For more information, visit www.compassdatacenters.com.

About Workplace Elemental Technologies
Workplace Elemental Technologies was founded in 2020 by Jim Levin, a veteran technology executive with a 25-year history of bringing sustainable and efficient technology solutions to business customers. With the unprecedented workplace challenges created by the Covid-19 pandemic, Jim decided to focus his efforts on helping to create safer workplaces for employees, customers, patients and shareholders through the identification and distribution of a portfolio of innovative technologies addressing air and water challenges. For more information, visit www.go4wettech.com

MEDIA CONTACTS:
Jo Trizila, TrizCom PR on behalf of ActivePure
Email: [email protected]
Office: 972-247-1369
Cell/Text: 214-232-0078

Kyra Castillo, TrizCom PR on behalf of ActivePure
Email: [email protected]
Office: 972-247-1369
Cell/Text: 214-695-7080

SOURCE: ActivePure Technology

View source version on accesswire.com:
https://www.accesswire.com/697996/Compass-Datacenters-Selects-ActivePure-For-New-Workplace-Health-Initiative

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Ozone, too, can have an adverse effect on our health. Up high in the atmosphere, it plays an important role in protecting us from ultraviolet radiation. But at ground level, especially indoors, it can react with various chemicals. The result, sometimes, can be temporary paralysis of the cilia that help expel phlegm from your throat.

It’s no wonder, then, that trying to get a better understanding of the air we breathe is catching on more and more. In 2018, an article in Bloomberg CityLab described how residents in Utah and Colorado, concerned with wildfire smoke and increasing levels of truck pollution, turned to tiny monitors to measure the cleanliness of the air in and around their homes. Last fall, The New York Times reported how concerned parents were even hiding air-quality monitors in backpacks as a way to gauge how well ventilated were the school buildings where they sent their kids every day.

Beyond these individual measures, there are other moves happening to glean more insight into the air we breathe when we’re not outside.

Poppendieck is a member of the Indoor Air Quality and Ventilation Group within the federal government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology. Since February, he and about a dozen other researchers have been involved in one of the largest studies ever conducted on the quality of the air inside, an effort that wraps up this month. A key part of the study, which is happening at a residential test facility in Maryland, is trying to determine the effects of pollutants such as wildfire smoke, urban smog, and common commercial products used in cooking and cleaning. How do these various elements affect us as they permeate the atmosphere in our apartments, houses, and places of business?

“That’s the million-dollar question,” Poppendieck says. “Indoor air matters, but we don’t understand it well.”

To be clear, there is some correlation between indoor air and human health. It’s not difficult for the person with allergies to asthma to know when, or when not, the air inside where they live or work is messing with their health, Mendez says. And who wants mold, commonly linked to allergic reactions like sneezing, runny noses, and itchy, red eyes, inside their home? The question is over, precisely, what connections can be drawn between crummy indoor air and personal health.

On that point, Poppendieck cautions people against relying too heavily on air-quality monitors. “Consumer-grade sensors are really good at measuring changes, but they’re not going to tell you if [the air is] healthy or safe,” he says. “You could have a well-ventilated space, but if you have a gas station next door? No consumer-grade sensors would detect that.”

More important, according to Mendez, is doing your best to ventilate indoor spaces. Turn on the range hood when you’re cooking. Open windows to circulate indoor air. And running an indoor air filter can also help—as it did for Krieger.

“People that I talk to, if you have the money to get an air filter, you get one, you keep it on hand, and you run it,” she says. “That’s just our normal part of life now.”

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Things are not the same as they were before the pandemic. We have a new highly transmissible disease in our midst and we can’t expect that doing the same thing as before coronavirus will lead to the same results.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the minister for government efficiency, has written to all secretaries of state asking them to encourage civil servants in their departments back into the workplace: “Now that we are learning to live with Covid and have lifted all legal restrictions in England, we must continue to accelerate the return of civil servants to office buildings to realise the benefits of face-to-face, collaborative working and the wider benefits for the economy.”

It’s understood that full capacity doesn’t mean all civil servants returning to work in person, apparently due to the lack of space in Whitehall offices, but secretaries have been urged “to issue a clear message to civil servants” to return to the office so that departments can “run at full capacity”.

This blanket edict comes in direct contradiction to a report from the Institute for Government thinktank. Reducing hybrid working opportunities, it suggests, will mean the government struggles to achieve its goals of competing with the private sector to recruit its preferred candidates for civil service positions, relocating centres of civil service away from the capital and reducing the size of its estate.

Perhaps more pertinently, encouraging people unnecessarily into crowded work environments is not a good strategy for controlling Covid transmission, especially when rates are already extremely high, as they are now. The phrase “learning to live with Covid”, as used by Rees-Mogg, has become a byword among government ministers for removing all Covid mitigations and returning to pre-pandemic practices. But things are not the same as they were before.

As we have seen over the past few weeks, the “return to normal” has been accompanied by large-scale disruption to schools and businesses due to infections and reinfections. The NHS is once again under extreme pressure. Years of austerity combined with Covid has brought the service to its knees. Waiting lists in England for routine care are at record highs. In the longer term we should expect millions of people to catch Covid each year resulting in a population that is generally less healthy both from the burden of infection and the long-term consequences of the virus. The regressive move of forcing people back into busy workplaces can only be expected to exacerbate our Covid problems.

Taking away the tools that mitigate the spread of Covid – free testing, supported isolation, mask mandates and flexible working – or the tools that help us monitor the situation (the Zoe symptom tracker study and the React-1 survey) won’t ameliorate the UK’s Covid situation, but only make it worse. It smacks of a government that is desperate to put the pandemic behind it by simply ignoring what is happening.

Instead, we should be increasing basic public health measures such as contract tracing, testing and surveillance, rather than scaling them back. We should improve public health communication so people understand how best to protect themselves and their communities. We should be instituting mandatory criteria for the quality of indoor air by improving ventilation, filtration and sterilisation, as well as encouraging people to wear high-grade masks in indoor public settings. If, as seems likely, the government is going to accept the huge disease burden that Covid poses, then, at the very least, we must address the chronic underfunding facing the NHS. Capacity must be scaled up and additional resources funnelled to primary care alongside the integration of sustainable plans for social care.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Covid is a problem you can only tackle head on. Closing your eyes and hoping for the best doesn’t work. Nor does declaring the pandemic over, as former health secretary Matt Hancock has done. No matter how loudly the government protests, the virus won’t listen.

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Foster + Partners has designed a new, state-of-the-art skyscraper, slated to be built at 270 Park Avenue in New York City. Photo courtesy Katy Harris

Foster + Partners has designed a new, state-of-the-art skyscraper, slated to be built at 270 Park Avenue in New York City. The 423-m (1388-ft), 60-story building will be one of the city’s largest all-electric towers with net-zero operational emissions.

Using an advanced structural system to negotiate the site constraints below and at ground level, the innovative fan-column structure and triangular bracing allow the building to touch the ground lightly across the entire block. By lifting the building about 24 m (80 ft) off the ground, it extends the viewpoint from the Park Avenue entrance through to Madison Avenue.

The project is the first under New York City’s innovative Midtown East rezoning plan, which encourages modern office construction and improvements to the business district’s public realm and transportation.

Serving as the global headquarters for financial firm JPMorgan Chase, the new building will house up to 14,000 employees, replacing an outdated facility built the late 1950s for around 3500 employees. It is designed to offer more outdoor space on the ground level of Park and Madison Avenues, featuring wider sidewalks and a large public plaza with natural greenspace.

270 Park Avenue will be 100 percent powered by renewable energy sourced from a New York State hydroelectric plant. It will also aim to achieve indoor air quality that exceeding the highest standards in sustainability, health, and wellness.

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