2021 年 36 巻 4 号 p. 253-262
There is considerable public interest in monitoring airborne viruses in ambient air. The typical method to monitor airborne viruses is to collect them into a liquid and analyze the liquid suspension to enumerate the viruses. As a result, an effective sampling device is a critical component of a system for monitoring airborne viruses. This study presents a novel electrostatic aerosol-to-hydrosol sampler that collects aerosol particles on the wet-inner surface of a rotating cylindrical chamber. The prototype's collection performance was evaluated in terms of physical and biological efficiencies, and the results were compared to those of BioSampler, a liquid impinger. The biological recovery efficiency (BRE) of our prototype for Influenza A virus subtype H1N1 was as high as the previously reported BRE of BioSampler. Furthermore, our prototype's aerosol-to-hydrosol enrichment capacity was approximately 50 times that of BioSampler. Additional tests were carried out to simulate the concentration of airborne viruses during flu season. The collected suspension was analyzed using real-time PCR after collecting the test aerosol for 10 minutes. The result shows that the measured Ct-values in the collected suspension are within the dynamic range of the real-time PCR indicating that our prototype can collect a large enough amount of viruses from ambient air during flu season.
