Linsey Marr

Preprint: Surveillance on California Dairy Farms Reveals Multiple Sources of H5N1 Transmission Credit  EID Journal #18,821 Six weeks ago, in  Dairy Cows Infected with Influenza A(H5N1) Reveals Low Infectious Dose and Transmission Bar...

Avian Flu Diary commented on our preprint describing H5N1 environmental contamination in air, cow's exhaled breath, wastewater, milking equipment at dairy farms, led by Seema Lakdawala.

afludiary.blogspot.com/2025/08/prep...

What a terrible loss for all Americans! Our air and water are cleaner than in many other parts of the world thanks to EPA's research.

Quantifying Dissemination of Antibiotic Resistance Genes in Air from a Dairy Farm and Swine Farm Farms are a suspected source of dissemination of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) to the atmosphere, but their contribution remains poorly quantified. This study investigated the concentrations, emi...

Quantifying Dissemination of Antibiotic Resistance Genes in Air from a Dairy Farm and Swine Farm, led by PhD student David Kormos, now published! We found ARGs in a range of particle sizes, indicating potential for inhalation exposure and long-range transport.

pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Still surprising to me:

“The highest particle concentrations we ever see in my house are when we’re cooking,” Dr. Marr said. “Even if you cook your food without burning it, it still generates a lot of particles, if you’re sautéing something on the stove, for example.”

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Do I Really Need an Air Purifier?

GIFT LINK: Good primer about portable air cleaners. We have two that we use for pollen, wildfire smoke, particles from cooking, viruses when someone is sick.

Clarification: Some, but not all, filters are made of the same material as masks (polypropylene).

www.nytimes.com/2025/06/30/c...

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@patriciafabian.bsky.social's group wrangled a huge amount of data from >4000 rooms in 125 schools and calculated air-exchange rates (AERs). "Calculated AER ranged from < 0.1–64 /hr, averaging 3.0 /hr (SD = 2.9)."

Wow, very impressive! This is a great data set!

Vehicle tire wear creating air pollution Associate Professor Hosein Foroutan in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering uses the Virginia Tech Smart Road to study how tire wear from driving gas-powered and electric vehicles con...

My colleague Hosein Foroutan is using some of our particle analyzers to study air pollution generated by tire wear. Did you know that tires lose 10-20% of their weight over their lifetimes?! It ends up as dust particles in air and on the road.

news.vt.edu/videos/k/202...

Tripp Shealy by the rapids in McCoy, Virginia, on the New River.

Chris Roy in Southwest, Virginia.

Linsey Marr overlooking the hills of Southwest Virginia.

Aaron Goldstein finds gravel near the Huckleberry trail just outside the Blacksburg campus.

Nestled in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, #VirginiaTech is home to stunning outdoor destinations and researchers who find balance in the great outdoors.

Six @vtengineering.bsky.social faculty members share how they thrive in both the lab and the outdoors. ➡️ brnw.ch/21wTr96

ChatGPT told me that trepanation, or drilling a hole in your skull, releases pressure and enhances consciousness, so it must be true.

Avian Influenza A(H5N1) Isolated from Dairy Farm Worker, Michigan, USA Avian Influenza A(H5N1) Isolated from Dairy Farm Worker, Michigan

Important result from CDC research team: H5N1 flu virus from a dairy farm worker transmitted by direct contact in ferrets with 100% efficiency (6/6 animals infected) and by droplets/aerosols in ferrets, physically separated, with 50% efficiency (3/6 animals infected).

wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/...

Discussion panel of four professors at the front of a classroom

Marc Edwards and I @macfound.org
joined two other @vtengineering.bsky.social faculty members to discuss the importance of sharing our research with the public through media interviews, during a
@virginiatech.bsky.social event for alumni.

Show 1433: What Are the Hidden Dangers in the Air We Breathe? Podcast Episode · The People's Pharmacy · 06/05/2025 · 1h 9m

Here's my conversation about AIR-BORNE on @peoplespharmacy.bsky.social [I show up at around 6:20] podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/s...

My former postdoc @nishit-shetty.bsky.social and I contributed to the development of a "calm-aerosol settling chamber" by Daniel Perez' lab. It will enable pre-screening of pandemic potential of viruses and expand capabilities to study transmission. journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Time for a sports analogy: Team USA has been dominant in the Olympics thanks to infrastructure and investment. We decide to throw in the towel and let other countries take over.

I'm sad to see this happening to our scientific and medical research.

Cutting the NIH—The $8 Trillion Health Care Catastrophe This JAMA Forum discusses the recent budget cuts to National Institutes of Health (NIH), the effects of these cuts on scientific research and health of individuals in the US, and the prospects for cha...

"Our calculations suggest that the proposed budgetary cuts to the NIH will create a social cost that is 16 times greater than the savings that the administration is attempting to achieve."
jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Pollution From the Tijuana River Affects Air Quality in San Diego A new study from UC San Diego examines how pollutants from the Tijuana River travel and are transmitted in the atmosphere through coastal aerosols. The study found a mixture of drugs and chemicals fro...

Our paper just came out in Science Advances showing the chemicals in the air in Imperial Beach (many aerosolized from the polluted Tijuana River). Thanks to the entire team--especially to Prof. Nate Slade and his (then) graduate student (now Dr.) Adam Cooper.

today.ucsd.edu/story/tijuan...

Ironically, when using cleaning products to clean our homes, we temporarily dirty the air.

Changes include volatile compounds from the cleaning products and their chemical reaction products, and also new offgassing and uptake by the surfaces that have been disturbed.

Alice Hamilton at Harvard—Pioneer for Women in Medicine | Harvard Magazine Brief life of a public-health pioneer and reformer: 1869-1970

I didn't realize that calls for the removal of lead in gasoline started in the 1920s with Alice Hamilton, first woman to join the faculty at Harvard. It took 70 years until lead was finally banned from gasoline. She was a trailblazer for occupational health!

www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/05/hist...

Dislike! I'm sorry. This is so awful.

The KPFA Evening News (Saturday) - April 26, 2025 | KPFA Weekend Edition of the KPFA Evening News, which is a collaboration of KPFA and KFCF in Fresno.

I talked about our results on ionization for disinfection of airborne bacteria in a lecture hall on @kpfa.org Evening News starting at 13:00. TLDR: it didn't work.

pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

kpfa.org/episode/the-...

CDC reports 216 child deaths this flu season, the most in 15 years Since flu season is still ongoing, data is preliminary and may change, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. Experts say it will likely increase.

Brutal: www.cbsnews.com/news/child-f...

CDC reports 216 child deaths this flu season, the most in 15 years

We manually examined all SEM images and excluded particles that were not clearly resolved using automated thresholding. We also excluded particles <0.1 μm from analysis due to uncertainties in the measured elemental fractions. New STXM analysis confirmed organic content.

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Second Correction to “Size-Resolved Elemental Composition of Respiratory Particles in Three Healthy Subjects” const script = document.createElement("script"); if (typeof PB === "undefined") { console.log("PB not found"); console.log("load osano"); script.id = "osanoScript"; script.type = "text/javascript"; script.async = true; script.src = "https://cmp.osano.com/16BPzAUFV1UoQ26HU/10002854-e376-4b5a-919a-0dd3ef22c9ed/osano.js"; document.head.append(script); } else { if (PB.deps) { console.log("load osano"); script.id = "osanoScript"; script.type = "text/javascript"; script.async = true; script.src = "https://cmp.osano.com/16BPzAUFV1UoQ26HU/10002854-e376-4b5a-919a-0dd3ef22c9ed/osano.js"; document.head.append(script); } else { console.log("don't load osano"); } }

We published a second correction to “Size-Resolved Elemental Composition of Respiratory Particles in Three Healthy Subjects." This affects the number of particles analyzed and corresponding statistics, but it does not affect the main conclusions of the paper.

pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

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I was annoyed that "zoonotic" wasn't allowed. If it appears more than a couple of times in their articles, I think it should be valid.

Thanks for the reminder

I "liked" your post, but really, I dislike it a lot. I'm so sorry about this turn of events.

At the Randall Lecture @virginiatech.bsky.social today, Ali Boehm told a scintillating story about finding oddly high levels of flu virus (H5N1) in wastewater before it was identified in cows. @wastewaterscan.bsky.social is a great resource!

The study would have helped inform design of trials to test the effectiveness of far UV, which has a lot of potential but remains unproven in the real world. Funders are interested in this, and I think the study would have saved $ by avoiding spending on poorly designed experiments.

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I just heard the disappointing news that a @nationalacademies.org study on far UV to reduce transmission of respiratory infections was canceled.

www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/cli...

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