“By 2030, reduce the adverse per capita environmental impact of cities, including by paying special attention to air quality and municipal and other waste management,” reads?. According to a World Health Organization (WHO) , “air pollution is the world’s largest environmental health threat – 99% of people breathe air that exceeds WHO air quality limits.” In light of this, many higher education institutions worldwide are stepping forward.
Researchers at the?, a member institution of the?United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI)?in Argentina that also serves as the initiative’s Hub for?, developed a novel device for measuring air quality while collecting and sampling fine particles for subsequent lab analysis, designed to detect environmental pollutants and assess their impact on general health and the immune system in particular. This development stands out for its cost, which is significantly lower than its commercially available counterparts.
“This type of equipment costs around ten thousand dollars on the market, but ours was developed for less than two thousand,” explained the director of the university’s Platform for Environmental Studies and Sustainability and head of the project, Aristides Pochettino. “It has two parts: on the one hand, the Rosario Institute of Physics developed the prototype; on the other, a laboratory for environmental analysis was installed in a space given to the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies by the university’s College of Medical Sciences,” he added.
There are two specific goals. First, collect the material in the air through an especially designed device connected to a vacuum pump acting for twenty minutes, and then the result is analyzed on the microscope, and contaminants are classified. Second, the concentration of fine particles is evaluated through optical techniques using an attached instrument. “We measure the amount of particles equal to or less than 2.5 microns present in the air in units of micrograms per cubic meter,” said Adriana Ipi?a, a researcher at the Rosario Institute of Physics.
The researcher commented that this type of equipment usually has a very high cost and limited versatility. “This particular design has both functionalities, which can actually be increased using elements found in the industry at the national level. This is very relevant because it is intended to be a key instrument for various research tasks. We have reviewed several scientific works and international publications that enabled us in creating this device,” the scientist further explained, highlighting that it costs at least 80% less than similar ones in the market.
Its creation originated from a pressing need: the judicial request for data on air quality during the fires in the wetland in 2020, made to the Province of Santa Fe and the Municipality of Rosario. “At that time, only partial and isolated data was available, without solid expert support. The lack of a comprehensive solution led us to measure the situation, but we lacked the data collection capacity, which required hiring a private service,” Pochettino recalled. “Our device provides unmatched scientific value, giving us information that was unknown until now,” he said.
The work carried out arises from the need to obtain this data systematically using a mobile and portable device with the advantage of performing measurements in different places. “When collecting the particles, in addition to studying the different types of contaminants that may be present in the sample, the idea is also to study the effect sthey produce on the immune system, and for that we expose cells of the immune system to the collected particles,” detailed Bettina Bongiovanni, another of the researchers involved in the project.
The team seeks to investigate whether exposure to these particles can exacerbate pre-existing diseases or enhance their development. “We use human macrophages, one of the body’s first lines of defense, growing them and then exposing them to the particles in order to observe the effects through an analysis of immunological markers,” Bongiovanni said while adding that this also serves to improve health and counter climate change denial. “As a society, we have no knowledge of the air we breathe, and we need to change that,” Ipi?a commented.
