Indoor Air 2002 Proceedings

Ninth International Conference on Indoor Air Quality and Climate, Hal Levin, Editor. CD-ROM version: $100; 5-volume printed version: $200. Shipping additional. Download an order form:

www.indoorair2002.org.

If you’re doing research on indoor air quality issues, you shouldn’t be without this treasure trove of information. Every oral and poster presentation from the Indoor Air 2002 Conference in Monterey, California—726 papers in all—is included here in Adobe Acrobat™ portable document format (PDF). Helping to make all this accessible are several well-designed navigational aids: a keyword index, an author index, and, on the CD, full-text search capability.

The International Conference on Indoor Air Quality and Climate is held every three years (the 1999 Conference was in Tokyo). The intervening years were used to solicit and peer-review the papers, so they have all been screened by technical experts. Asked about highlights in the proceedings, conference chair Hal Levin responded: “For me, the plenary lectures tended to capture the best of what’s happening in the field.” Levin specifically recommends works by C. Weschler on indoor air chemistry, L. A. Bero on the science and policy issues of environmental tobacco smoke, A. Nevalainen on microbial contaminants, TAE Platts-Mills and others on asthma and indoor air exposures, B. Seifert on volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and O. Seppänen on ventilation “for coverage of the hottest topics in indoor air today.” In addition to the plenary presentations, other important papers covered some of these same topics, according to Levin, as well as other topics, including thermal comfort, the relationship between indoor environmental quality and productivity, dealing with dirty HVAC systems, and issues specific to developing countries, such as the health effects of cooking with wood and other indigenous fuels. Perhaps the most surprising research presented at the conference was the finding that keeping pets or living on farms appears to help protect children from developing asthma.

If you couldn’t get to the conference, with these proceedings you can still benefit from the technical content. There is even an e-mail address for each paper’s author, so you can follow up with questions. If you still aren’t sure about spending the (very reasonable) purchase price, you can download a file containing the abstracts for all 726 papers from the conference Web site and decide if they will be useful to you.

– NM