Biohazard in air-conditioning systems installed in health facilities

The project "Biological hazard related to the operation of air-conditioning systems in sanitary environments in the province of Avellino" has had, as its main objective, the microbiological monitoring of the environments hospitals in order to evaluate the microbiological quality of the air, through procedures and criteria for sampling the environmental microbial flora. This procedure aims to assess and manage risks related to the hygiene of air treatment plants (UTA), which must be periodically subjected to checks, maintenance, cleaning and sanitisation in order to protect the health of Workers according to technical standards and national guidelines. Most important was the characterisation at the level of species and gender of the main microbiological contaminants present within the samples investigated. The entire trial was carried out on a temporal scale taking into account the frequency of the UTA maintenance activities and thus establishing the monitoring plan. In order to assess the effectiveness of the maintenance plan and the efficiency of the actions of sanitizations, withdrawals should be made at three different times or immediately after ordinary maintenance, halfway between the first and second Maintenance and immediately before the second maintenance. This way you can monitor the presence of different bacterial contaminants in time. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of bacteria, pathogens and not, in hospital environments aims to prevent the onset and spread of pathologies. In particular, the monitoring of air handling units is of fundamental importance since such plants can cause the diffusion of many pollutants, coming from outside or inside, resulting from residues of materials from Construction, from remnants of plant and animal origin (pigeons, mice, insects) or moulds and bacteria that can contaminate the water and the surfaces inside the aeraulic plants. The molecular-based taxonomic characterization of the most representative species in the test specimens has as its main purpose the identification of any "sentinel" markers as well as indicators of biohazard

GPS observations of coseismic deformation following the 2016, August 24, Mw 6 Amatrice earthquake (central Italy): data, analysis and preliminary fault model

We used continuous Global Positioning System (GPS) measurements to infer the fault geometry and the amount of coseismic slip associated to the August 24, 2016 Mw 6 Amatrice earthquake. We realized a three dimensional coseismic displacement field by combining different geodetic solutions generated by three independent analyses of the raw GPS observations. The coseismic deformation field described in this work aims at representing a consensus solution that minimizes the systematic biases potentially present in the individual geodetic solutions. Because of the limited number of stations available we modeled the measured coseismic displacements using a uniform slip model, deriving the geometry and kinematics of the causative fault, finding good agreement between our geodetically derived fault plane and other seismological and geological observations.