ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Hybrid measurement of respiratory aerosol reveals a dominant coarse fraction resulting from speech that remains airborne for minutes.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 23 citations in OpenAlex.
- Trial
- Chemical Analysis of Deep-Lung Fluid Derived from Exhaled Breath Particles.Analytical chemistry · 2025Article
- Debulking influenza and herpes simplex virus strains by a wide-spectrum anti-viral protein formulated in clinical grade chewing gum.Molecular therapy : the journal of the American Society of Gene Therapy · 2025Article
- Resolving the Loss of Intermediate-Size Speech Aerosols in Funnel-Guided Particle Counting Measurement.Atmosphere · 2024Article
- Large Particle Emissions from Human Vocalization and Playing of Wind Instruments.Environmental science & technology · 2023Article
- Peak risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection within 5 s of face-to-face encounters: an observational/retrospective study.Scientific reports · 2023Observational
- Article
- Risk assessment for long- and short-range airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2, indoors and outdoors.PNAS nexus · 2022Article
- Snoring may transmit infectious aerosols from the upper to the lower respiratory tract.Medical hypotheses · 2022Article
- Exhaled breath SARS-CoV-2 shedding patterns across variants of concern.International journal of infectious diseases : IJID : official publication of the International Society for Infectious Diseases · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Accurate measurements of the size and quantity of aerosols generated by various human activities in different environments are required for efficacious mitigation strategies and accurate modeling of respiratory disease transmission. Previous studies of speech droplets, using standard aerosol instrumentation, reported very few particles larger than 5 μm. This starkly contrasts with the abundance of such particles seen in both historical slide deposition measurements and more recent light scattering observations. We have reconciled this discrepancy by developing an alternative experimental approach that addresses complications arising from nucleated condensation. Measurements reveal that a large volume fraction of speech-generated aerosol has diameters in the 5- to 20-μm range, making them sufficiently small to remain airborne for minutes, not hours. This coarse aerosol is too large to penetrate the lower respiratory tract directly, and its relevance to disease transmission is consistent with the vast majority of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections initiating in the upper respiratory tract. Our measurements suggest that in the absence of symptoms such as coughing or sneezing, the importance of speech-generated aerosol in the transmission of respiratory diseases is far greater than generally recognized.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.