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Abstract
There is a need for toxicity tests capable of recognizing indoor environments with compromised air quality, especially in the context of moisture damage. One of the key issues is sampling, which should both provide meaningful material for analyses and fulfill requirements imposed by practitioners using toxicity tests for health risk assessment. We aimed to evaluate different existing methods of sampling indoor particulate matter (PM) to develop a suitable sampling strategy for a toxicological assay. During three sampling campaigns in moisture-damaged and non-damaged school buildings, we evaluated one passive and three active sampling methods: the Settled Dust Box (SDB), the Button Aerosol Sampler, the Harvard Impactor and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) Bioaerosol Cyclone Sampler. Mouse RAW264.7 macrophages were exposed to particle suspensions and cell metabolic activity (CMA), production of nitric oxide (NO) and tumor necrosis factor (TNFα) were determined after 24 h of exposure. The repeatability of the toxicological analyses was very good for all tested sampler types. Variability within the schools was found to be high especially between different classrooms in the moisture-damaged school. Passively collected settled dust and PM collected actively with the NIOSH Sampler (Stage 1) caused a clear response in exposed cells. The results suggested the higher relative immunotoxicological activity of dust from the moisture-damaged school. The NIOSH Sampler is a promising candidate for the collection of size-fractionated PM to be used in toxicity testing. The applicability of such sampling strategy in grading moisture damage severity in buildings needs to be developed further in a larger cohort of buildings.
Highlights
Due to the adverse health effects linked with exposure to indoor air in moisturedamaged buildings (WHO, 2009) and the high prevalence of moisture observations in building stock (Haverinen-Shaughnessy et al, 2012), it is crucial to be able to identify the buildings that are most likely to cause health issues to the occupants
The coefficient of variation (CV) of the duplicate analyses was typically less than 10%, indicating good repeatability of the analyses
Our findings indicate that size fractionated sampling as performed here with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) Cyclone Aerosol Sampler could be a suitable sampling approach for toxicological testing of indoor particulate matter (PM), even though issues of yielding sufficient sample amounts and the potential to differentiate moisture damaged from non-damaged indoor environments are still to be resolved
Summary
Due to the adverse health effects linked with exposure to indoor air in moisturedamaged buildings (WHO, 2009) and the high prevalence of moisture observations in building stock (Haverinen-Shaughnessy et al, 2012), it is crucial to be able to identify the buildings that are most likely to cause health issues to the occupants. Since the measurement of microbial markers has been insufficient for identifying moisture damaged buildings linked with ill health, other ways to assess indoor air quality have been explored, including toxicity assays measuring the biological response, e.g. cell cultures. These studies have suggested that the toxicity and inflammatory potential of airborne dust in vitro might reflect the biological activity of the exposure (Huttunen et al, 2008, 2010). Settled dust is part of the house dust reservoir that can be sampled by vacuuming directly from carpets, furniture or floors into filters, tubes or nylon sampling socks (Arbes et al, 2005; Casas et al, 2013; Leppänen et al, 2014; Pitkäranta et al, 2011)
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