I had an invite from Dr Moshe Pritsker, the Editor-in-Chief to contribute to the new Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE), the first video journal for biological research accepted in PubMed. Though the papers are more biological and medical than hygiene, the journal has potential to add another dimension to publishing. I did a search for microscope on the website www.jove.com and found a couple of good articles and videos by Victoria Centonze Frohlich at the University of Texas.
My interests in visualisation make eventually get published with JoVE:
- Use of chemical and theatrical smoke to visualise airflows – important for Indoor Air Quality studies and Industrial Ventilation studies (you can see the poor performance with most fume cupboards, with toxic exposures 10 to 100 times greater than good designs). I designed a special glass wind tunnel for teaching and research in Industrial Ventilation. I sometimes use a simple air flow visualisation setup with smoke tubes and an overhead projector to demonstrate good and bad design with industrial ventilation hoods.
- Visualisation of toxic exposures to physical and chemical hazards. This is sometimes called PIMEX or VEM (visual exposure monitoring), where video of toxic tasks is linked to monitoring data to determine how the performance of a task affects toxic exposures.
- Fluorescence tracer studies of skin exposures. I am presently commissioning a portable, whole body dark room to use UV or blue light to reveal the extent of skin contamination during the performance of tasks. This can be anything from refuelling helicopters to emptying bedpans contaminated with cytotoxic drugs in oncology wards. I am hoping to make the technology cheaper by using simple optical filters on the flash and lens of a cheap digital camera.
