After completing my masters, I began working in health policy and public affairs, with experience in the UK Parliament, international public affairs agencies and in-house for patient advocacy organisations. I have worked across a wide range of health advocacy campaigns including to secure the endorsement of the World Health Organization<\/a> for the recognition of World Hepatitis Day<\/a>, on delivering socially inclusive end-of-life care and spent most of the last decade as head of policy and public affairs for a cancer charity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the start of the pandemic I was living in the UK with my young family. Before the country went into lockdown, we all became sick and I lost my sense of taste and smell for two weeks. 10 days after our symptoms began, my 3-and-a-half-year-old daughter suffered a prolonged status epilepticus seizure and was hospitalised. It was several hours before she woke up from the buccal that eventually stopped the seizure, the longest hours of my life. Over the next fortnight she continued to be very unwell, with a range of other challenging symptoms, and required several additional trips to hospital. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Both my daughter and I were \u2018previously healthy\u2019 and had no known risk factors for serious illness. Unfortunately, by April 2020, I began developing neurological and cardiovascular symptoms that we now know to be long COVID, which persist today. Adding to our family risk, my husband also has an auto-immune disease that means he needs a transplant and therefore remains at significantly increased risk from any infection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a result of my family\u2019s experience and my almost 20-year history working in public health advocacy, I have spent many hours awake at night focusing on the policy solutions to create a safer and more inclusive environments for families like mine. The answer seems so simple – the pandemic is ultimately fuelled by indoor transmission in poorly ventilated buildings and improving indoor air quality is therefore the obvious solution to making shared indoor air safer for everyone to breathe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As an example, in the same way we\u2019ve acted to make our communities accessible for people who use wheelchairs by installing ramps, we need to make our indoor air safe for everyone to breathe. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve learned a lot over the last four years about how I can protect the health of my family, and those around us, when it comes to the air we breathe. We bought masks early on in 2020, but they were cloth and surgical masks as I really didn\u2019t understand enough about airborne transmission at that stage, especially when public health messaging was really focused on hand washing! <\/p>\n\n\n\n Over the course of the first year I learned a lot and I am thankful to the many experts sharing research and knowledge about airborne transmission on X (Twitter) – especially helping to understand about how viruses like SARS-CoV-2 hang in the air like smoke in poorly ventilated spaces. As a result we bought better masks and our first HEPA filters and, by the time the kids went back to school in March 2021, my son\u2019s preschool gladly accepted the donation of a HEPA filter. Oddly, my daughter\u2019s primary school declined the offer; that was surprising and frustrating, but a very common experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So common, that when we moved back to Australia in December 2021 and I began having the same conversations with our new preschool and primary school exactly the same thing happened! I was finally successful in getting a SmartAir Blast MKII into my daughter\u2019s primary class in June 2023, after 18 months of hard won advocacy. Now she\u2019s moved up a year and my son has joined and they both have them in their classrooms and I\u2019ve even been able to put a Birdie CO2 monitor into my son\u2019s kindy classroom!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Outside of school we monitor how safe the air is with indoor air quality (IAQ) monitors, both at home and when we\u2019re out and about. We have a variety of HEPA filters and Corsi-Rosenthal boxes throughout our house, and we\u2019ve even replaced the car cabin air filter to a HEPA grade filter which is also helpful when we experience bushfires (and controlled burns). In addition to these IAQ tools we also wear respirators indoors, we also use nasal sprays, and we continue to test and isolate if we get sick so that we can protect each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n People living with chronic health conditions need safe access to indoor environments, without risk of infection by airborne viruses and, to do so, we need to make our shared air safe. So we have created the Safer Air Project as a health promotion charity to address the challenges of access and inclusion experienced by people living with chronic health conditions, and to ensure that indoor air is safe for everyone to breathe.<\/p>\n\n\n![\"Plum](\"https:\/\/smartairfilters.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/IMG_20240420_152628-768x1024.jpg\")
So, with everything you’ve learned about indoor air quality, what are some things you do in your daily life to keep the air clean for yourself and your family? <\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The Safer Air Project seems to be doing both things at once – raising awareness about the importance of good indoor air quality and giving organizations practical tools. How do you manage to balance the “hey, air quality matters!” message with the “here’s exactly how to fix it” toolkit?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n