Published February 25th, 2022 at 2:39 pm

Albuquerque City Council is considering a bill that would ban smoking cannabis in most public areas.

There are no laws currently banning smoking cannabis in public, but the city council is looking to revise the Clean Indoor Air Ordinance—a law that bans smoking in certain areas like restaurants and bars. The new amendment would ban smoking pot on streets, sidewalks, bus stops and common areas of apartments as well as anywhere that tobacco smoke is banned. Violators would be fined up to $100 for a first violation and $200 for a second.

Police and firefighters would be in charge of enforcing the law but, according to KRQE, many are skeptical that officers will be able to enforce the law. Albuquerque Police Officers’ Association President Shaun Willoughby told reporters, “This is going to set an unrealistic expectation on law enforcement agencies throughout the state to try to regulate this law and we do not possess the manpower, the training and the reinforcements to get it done.”

Last year the city reportedly saw a record-breaking 109 homicides. According to law enforcement agencies, Albuquerque had 111 violent crimes per 10,000 people in the first three-quarters of 2021.

Lawmakers Accept, Then Reject Addiction Treatment Funding

Last week the New Mexico Senate voted to use tax dollars from adult-use cannabis sales to fund drug addiction treatment programs before reversing the decision soon after.

An amendment to the anti-crime bill that would have funneled 10 percent of the state’s revenue from cannabis sales tax into addiction treatment programs received near-unanimous support from the state’s Senate Financing Committee last week. Lawmakers voted 10 to 1 in favor of the amendment.

According to Source NM, the anti-crime bill’s sponsor, Sen. Joseph Cervantes (D-Las Cruces), said the amendment could make the bill subject to a line-item veto from the governor. When asked if the amendment was important enough to endanger the whole bill, the amendment’s sponsor Sen. Jeff Steinborn (D-Las Cruces) said it was “one of the most important parts” of the bill and said it was worth the risk.

Following an unofficial recess, the committee voted to approve a version of the bill that did not include the amendment.

Italian Court Blocks Cannabis Referendum

An Italian court has blocked a referendum that would have allowed voters to decide whether to legalize cannabis in the country.

In October Italian cannabis advocates turned a petition in to the Supreme Court of Cassation that was signed by 630,000 people. It called for legalizing marijuana and the cultivation of psychedelic plants. Last month a court validated the signatures, meaning the proposed referendum would be put on a ballot for voters to decide.

But last week the Italian Constitutional Court announced that the initiative did not meet constitutional standards and blocked the referendum. Advocates told reporters that they will continue to fight for legalization.

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Acoustic Designs Group has opened its technology and wellness showroom, unveiling recent wellness technology upgrades to the model-home style luxury technology facility in Scottsdale, AZ.

“Our showroom is a state-of-the-art technology and design space where our luxury residential clients can actually see and interact with the products we are recommending,” said Chris Matthews, partner at Acoustic Designs Group. “Once clients see how wellness features like circadian rhythm lighting and a living wall can easily be integrated into a beautifully designed home, these features become a must-have for them. We’re excited to be working with Delos and helping our clients live in a healthier environment.”

The 2,500-square-foot contemporary modern motif showroom includes a full functioning smart kitchen with an active green wall that uses artificial intelligence to track and monitor while naturally purifying indoor air through bio-filtration.

Delos products and solutions are incorporated throughout the showroom including a custom 3-Stage “whole-home” water filtration system that contains Ultra-filtration membrane technology with online monitoring capabilities, a responsive air filtration system that incorporates HEPA filtration to effectively target toxins and pollutants, and wellness lighting scenes including Circadian, Energize, and Relax have been integrated into various showroom areas including the master bedroom.

An Energizing Mirror is installed in the master bath to provide an energy boost whenever needed. The showroom includes an audiophile-grade 2-channel sound room and integrated wellness technology that features the DARWIN Home Wellness Intelligence Network.

DARWIN Premier is a best-in-class home wellness intelligence network bringing together science-backed products, strategies and technologies to create a personalized and customized experience to advance the health and well-being of those in the showroom. The system is powered by the DARWIN Hub (wellness brain) to help meet the health and wellness needs of the home.

DARWIN takes a comprehensive approach to curating a whole-home experience that passively enhances health and well-being through five core concepts: air, water, light, comfort, and DARWIN Intelligence. DARWIN is designed to help enhance energy, sleep, and overall well-being while also reducing indoor contaminants that negatively affect health.

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DENVER (AP) — Colorado Gov. Jared Polis has laid out his vision for how he thinks the state can emerge from the COVID-19 emergency with a plan that emphasizes training for health care workers and improving indoor air filtration systems.

“For those who are fully vaccinated, it is perfectly acceptable, and you do not need to feel guilty returning to your normal lives,” Polis said at a news conference Friday.

The Democratic governor’s plan aims to reduce the likelihood of future health emergencies. It includes improving hospital readiness with testing and COVID-19 approved therapies, expanding the healthcare workforce, updating public health and virus surge plans and promoting indoor air quality improvements in schools and public spaces.

The plan comes as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to significantly loosen federal mask-wearing guidelines, with most Americans no longer advised to wear masks indoors in public.

However, Polis noted that public settings such as small businesses and universities are still requiring masks, adding that residents should still carry masks.

“It’s just a polite thing to do — to be ready if asked, to put on a mask,” he said.

Polis urged immunocompromised people to ask their doctors about a possible fourth vaccine dose and continue taking precautions during times of high virus transmission.

A little more than 69% of Colorado residents have been fully vaccinated and nearly 78% have gotten at least one dose, according to AP data analysis.

“If you’re not fully vaccinated, I don’t know how many other ways I can say it or that health officials can say it, but the most important thing you can do to reduce your risk significantly is to get vaccinated,” Polis said.

The state also plans to promote federal policy changes for mass testing standards, additional funds for healthcare job training, supply-chain improvements for testing and other medical supplies and investing in long-term COVID-19 research.

“We need to normalize COVID within our healthcare system,” said Scott Bookman, the Colorado health department’s COVID-19 incident commander.

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It’s early March 2020, and things are starting to happen fast.

In the first week of the month, Coloradans learned about its first cases of COVID-19, a highly contagious and deadly coronavirus. A week later, a woman in her 80s living in El Paso County died from it, the state’s first death. The next day, with the virus spreading quickly, Gov. Jared Polis made the “agonizing” decision to close the state’s ski resorts.

In hopes of figuring out where things were headed, Dr. Rachel Herlihy, the state’s epidemiologist, was closely following trends and studies from around the globe. One from Imperial College London made an impact.

“The timeframe wasn’t weeks, wasn’t months, it was years potentially of this extended period of time where we were going to see waves of disease transmission,” she said. “That has certainly turned out to be what we have experienced.”

The paper also spotlighted unfamiliar strategies to corral the virus Coloradans would soon know all too well: social distancing, home isolation, flattening the curve.

Two years later, the paper seems prescient. The pandemic took a heavy toll: Colorado recorded 1.3 million COVID-19 cases, nearly 60,000 people have been hospitalized and more than 12,000 died. At the same time, collective mitigation efforts to control the spread have flattened the curve, limiting the damage.

Now the state is ready to turn the page, to transition to an uncertain next phase. 

It’s a “post suppression phase,” Herlihy said, “where we have high enough levels of immunity, where we really don’t need these public health strategies that we’ve been using for two years now to suppress transmission and flatten the curve.”

Gov. Jared Polis and his team on Friday unveiled a transition plan, its Roadmap To Moving Forward.

It envisions preparing hospital readiness standards, surge planning and normalizing COVID-19 patient care in traditional medical settings.

“We need to be ready and have those plans, ready to implement and ready to go,” Polis said in an interview Thursday.  

In his comments, the governor threaded a needle between forward-looking readiness and the emergency footing the state has been on at times the last two years. 

“The virus is gonna be here forever, presumably. We need to normalize our response as we do for other diseases,” he said.

He said that needed to be done in a way that doesn’t lead to things like restrictions on elective surgeries, which happened during COVID-19 surges.

“There could very well be additional peaks and valleys, just as we have seasonal flu season,” Polis, a Democrat, said. “Some of the scenarios might in fact show that if the vaccine protection wanes or there are variants that this is less protective against, there could be additional surges.” 

The plan aims to help rebuild a battered health care workforce by investing “in health care workforce stabilization and expansion. This pandemic has been hard on everybody, but it’s also driven a lot of retirements and people leaving the healthcare field.”

The move comes as most pandemic trends are giving Coloradans the kind of break they’ve rarely enjoyed the past two years.

On Tuesday, transmission, reflected via the state’s seven-day test positivity rate, dropped below the key 5 percent threshold to 4.71 percent. That was the first time it had reached that level in more than a half year. 

The state recorded 372 COVID-19 hospitalizations on Thursday, the first time the gauge had been below 400 since early August 2021. Still hospital staffing remains tight in some hospitals, with 38 percent of facilities saying they anticipate a staffing shortage and 26 percent anticipating an ICU bed shortage.

The roadmap rests on four pillars: establishing readiness standards and surge planning in hospitals, doing the same in public health, stabilizing the state’s health care workforce and engaging the federal government in national “endemic response,” including an updated and interoperable national surveillance system and flexible funding.

On the last point, Polis said “this caught everybody flat-footed two years ago, we cannot allow that to happen again.”

A chance for health care reform and better-prepared hospitals

The plan calls for the state of Colorado to advocate for a number of federal policies, including one to prevent price gouging, especially for staffing agencies.

Hospitals out of state are luring Colorado nurses, through staffing agencies, he said with “hundreds of dollars an hour” wages and “the middle man makes a lot of money, but that is not good.” 

The roadmap underscores a tension between public pandemic response and the for-profit health care system. The document states that the severe economic restrictions in the spring of 2020, when states had to issue stay-at-home orders, “were driven by a lack of national preparedness” including things like a lack of PPE, testing supplies and technology and access to staffed hospital beds and critical life saving medical supplies like ventilators.

“Leaders had to choose between bad and catastrophic outcomes of mass casualties or social and economic hardship,” the roadmap states. “We strive to never have to institute similar restrictions moving forward.” 

But neither the federal nor state governments have yet passed laws or regulations to ensure the sort of readiness that would stop that from happening again, according to the document.

Readiness means maintaining hospital capacity by ensuring adequate levels of staffing, according to the plan. It noted that when fall’s delta wave hit, Colorado hospitals had 50-660 fewer staffed hospital beds than prior waves “leaving little margin to absorb a spike in patients.” The governor’s roadmap calls for enhanced transparency into capacity and critical supplies.

But Colorado hospitals have 1.9 hospital beds per 1,000 residents, putting us on the lower end of the spectrum for hospital capacity. The national average is 2.4 beds per 1,000, and the best performing states at more than four beds per 1,000.

“Colorado is not in the position to allow our hospital capacity to drift downwards,” the governor’s plan said. “We need oversight measures in order to ensure that we are prepared,” it went on, without specifying.

The plan lays out several recommendations to help hospitals prepare. That includes ensuring critical supplies and PPE, providing COVID-19 testing and therapy “in other settings” in order to maintain emergency room services, maintaining hospital bed and staffing capacity and surge readiness activation plans, and cross-training of health care workers for emergency response.

The plan also advises requiring all outpatient, hospital owner, health care providers to deliver COVID-19 vaccination and workers for all appropriated health care providers, like primary care physicians, to provide diagnostic testing and prescribe COVID-19 therapeutics.

When it comes to public health policies, questions remain

When it comes to ensuring public health readiness and surge capacity, the plan calls for updating disease investigation and surveillance systems, like via wastewater, continued outbreak prevention and response activities in high-risk settings and continued vaccination efforts for “hard to reach communities,” efforts to “protect the most vulnerable, and for indoor air quality improvements in schools and public spaces. The roadmap offers scant specifics about how those goals would be achieved.

Likewise, plans for health care stabilization and expansion lacked actionable specifics. The roadmap calls for a multifaceted approach, involving partnerships with healthcare providers, and institutions of higher education to increase wages and improve work conditions, invest in attracting new additional healthcare workers to Colorado and break down barriers to entering the healthcare profession in credentialing and licensing, facilitating mid-career change to healthcare and greater National Guard capacity in healthcare for emergency needs.

Two other questions that remain unanswered:  Where would the money come to fund the transition plan and how would it line up with one for which the state recently put out a request for proposal?

According to the governor’s office the federal government has been fully funding the state’s COVID-19 response since the start of the Biden administration and is expected to do so through April. But in the coming months, the expectation is that the response would shift to be normalized through the broader health system.

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Molds, and especially yeasts, were far more common in indoor daycare centers than outside of them, according to a new study. Factors such as certain building features and the number of children in a daycare influenced the species of fungi found within, suggesting that many of the molds and yeasts probably have indoor sources.

“This information is important to understand the alarming increase in chronic diseases like asthma and allergies in children,” said first author Eva Lena Estensmo, Ph.D., University of Oslo, Norway. The research is published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

The study was motivated by the rise in chronic allergies and asthma, combined with the general lack of knowledge about the indoor mycobiome, said Dr. Estensmo. “Fungal growth can lead to poor indoor air quality, and some fungi are associated with allergic reactions and respiratory symptoms that may lead to chronic respiratory diseases.”

In the study, the researchers investigated the indoor and immediate outdoor mycobiomes of 125 daycare centers in Norway, sampling dust swabbed from the insides and outsides of door frames and correlating the findings with different variables such as the number and ages of children in each daycare, the building type (single building, apartment, etc.), building materials (bricks, wood, etc.), ventilation type, presence of pests, history of mold damage and year of construction.

The study also accounted for environmental data including temperature and moisture levels inside and out, distance from the coast, and longitude and latitude of the daycare centers.

“Especially the high diversity of yeasts came as a surprise,” said Dr. Estensmo. “Many might be associated with the human body. We don’t fully know whether the yeasts are especially associated with children, but we have some indications — work in progress — that far more yeasts are present in daycares than in other indoor environments.

“In addition, the daycare environment with a lot of activity and high density of people is an interesting environment to study in relation to human influence on the indoor mycobiome,” said Dr. Estensmo. She said it was well established that the indoor microbiome related to bacteria is influenced by humans, but that much less had been known about human influence on the mycobiome.

“Since young children often bring in organic materials such as soil and litter from nature, daycare centers may accumulate extra organic substrates promoting fungal growth, compared to other indoor environments,” the authors wrote. Previously, it has been shown that the concentration of fungi in daycare centers is higher than that in homes.

Citizen scientists played an important role in the research, using materials mailed to them by the investigators to collect dust samples from doorframes both outside and inside the buildings. They also filled out questionnaires the researchers had mailed them, on the number and ages of children in the daycares, the building type (single building, apartment, etc.) and the previously mentioned characteristics of the buildings.

Story Source:

Materials provided by American Society for Microbiology. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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Meet the ideal quartz designs for any project. The Quartz Select collection is the perfect combination of quality, resistance and natural appearance.

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Inspired by nature, designed to overcome it, Wilsonart Quartz is the best choice.

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NEWS

BUREAU VERITAS URGES FIRMS TO TAKE HEED OF NEW PART F REGULATIONS

Air quality specialist Bureau Veritas has welcomed the recent updates to Approved Document F, part of significant changes to Building Regulations, as a step in the right direction for indoor ventilation.

The changes come as the government has announced its ‘Living with COVID’ plan, and an end to COVID-19 isolation laws. 

Recent research found that more than 12 million residents in the UK are living with health issues that can be exacerbated by air pollution, and three million working days are lost every year because the air pollution in the UK exceeds the World Health Organization’s recommended limits.  

The last two years have highlighted the importance of indoor air quality and ventilation and the task at hand now, according to Bureau Veritas, is to take learnings from the pandemic, the ensuing lockdowns, and the habits formed to manage air flow to ensure compliance to new Part F regulations.  

Joe Marais, Occupational Hygiene Manager at Bureau Veritas, commented: “Ventilation has become something of a clear focus, both within the home and workplace over the last two years, with a greater awareness of poor air quality and ventilation linked to COVID-19.

“As the government announces its living with COVID strategy and an end to all remaining restrictions, it’s even more vital that businesses remain alert to the importance of good ventilation in mitigating the spread of the virus – as well as other illnesses such as the common cold – ensuring wellbeing for their staff, and efficiency and productivity for the business. 

“There are a number of simple steps businesses can take to drive towards greater fresh air ventilation, by opening windows or utilising air handling units – both of which COVID shone a spotlight on. However, the introduction of Part F places strict technical requirements on what must be achieved through ventilation.” 

Under the new Part F regulations, there is a requirement for whole building ventilation to meet a standard of 10 litres of fresh air per person per second, or one litre per second per square metre – whichever is highest (compared to only the former requirement in the past).

Common spaces will also require natural ventilation, with openings equal to at least 1/50th of the floor area or mechanical ventilation to supply 0.5 litres of fresh air per second per m2 of the common floor space area. 

Marais continued: “The pandemic highlighted that ventilation is a vital component for all buildings, placing a requirement on businesses and building managers to monitor indoor air quality, specifically within ‘high risk’ occupiable rooms, where there is a risk of airborne infection.

“COVID-19 measures temporarily enhanced standards, with many employers having invested in improved mechanical ventilation and air circulation services to support employee health and wellbeing.

“However, these temporary standards must become permanent if businesses hope to comply to new Part F rulings, and not slip back to pre-COVID attitudes. 

“To ensure a robust strategy is in place to promote good ventilation within the workplace, businesses must first ensure a quantitative assessment has been completed within the premises to monitor the ratio of fresh air to the size of the room or number of occupants, as well as qualitative reviews of air handling units to scrutinise their functionality.  

“This may sound like quite an undertaking, which is why we would always recommend partnering with a third party compliance specialist to complete the relevant audits and assessments, enabling the building manager to focus on creating a strategy to implement any recommendations.” 

Businesses and building managers can receive further advice and support on Part F from Bureau Veritas, by registering for its free webinar on Thursday 3 March at 11:00am. The webinar will cover what the updates to Part F mean for indoor air quality, what we have learnt from COVID-19 and what is expected from air handling units for new buildings. 

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