Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jh.edu.

That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

This is Lindsay Smith-Rogers.

So much focus lately has been on outdoor air quality, especially with recent smoke from Canadian

wildfires. But what about indoor air quality, which mostly goes unregulated? Today, Dr. Gigi

Granvall of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security joins Stephanie Desmond to talk about a new

framework designed to help states ensure there's clean air in schools and

government buildings. Let's listen. Tiki Granfall, thanks so much for joining me. Such a pleasure

to be here. So today we're going to talk about indoor air quality. I was reading that we basically

the average person spends 90% of their time indoors.

And when we talk about air quality, we're often talking about outdoor air quality.

So talk to me about why indoor air quality is important and why we aren't paying enough

attention to it.

Sure. So outdoor air quality, we are very fortunate, is much better here in the U.S. than many other places, and it's regulated. If you're a polluter, you could get caught. There are regulations in place that could stop you from polluting, but that's not the case for indoor air. And breathing is important. So it's really

important wherever you are that you have clean air to breathe. And often in indoor environments,

you just don't have ventilated, filtered air. And so people are exposed to high levels of pollutants, but also it increases your infectious

disease risk.

And so in the last few years, we've had a couple of big examples of both being problems.

So, you know, not just COVID, but RSV and flu can be something that you can share a little

bit too much with your neighbors and indoor

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