A new project funded by the US Department of Agriculture investigates how nonthermal plasma can inactivate airborne viruses to protect workers and livestock.
RT’s Three Key Takeaways:
- Airborne Virus Degradation: Researchers are investigating how the bird flu virus breaks down in the air around livestock to develop science-based guidelines for preventing future respiratory disease outbreaks.
- Nonthermal Plasma Technology: A new study will test how nonthermal plasmas, which use electric fields to damage viruses, can render airborne bird flu aerosols harmless to humans and animals.
- Worker Protection: Understanding the decay rate of airborne viruses in enclosed spaces is critical for protecting workers who face significantly higher risks of contracting respiratory infections in these environments.
University of Michigan researchers are leading a project to discover how the bird flu virus degrades in the air and how engineering solutions can mitigate its spread.
The $2 million grant from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service aims to answer fundamental questions about how long the virus remains infectious in the air and how it can be neutralized. The ongoing outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1, which began in 2022, has led to the loss of 175 million birds and cost the industry approximately $1.4 billion as of late 2024.
Herek Clack, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, will lead the project to test how nonthermal plasmas can render aerosols containing the virus incapable of infecting humans and livestock. The approach involves exposing air to strong electric fields, which creates free electrical charges that damage viruses and render them harmless.
“Both the USDA and the agricultural industry want a playbook—science-based guidelines—for how to operate under the threat of bird flu,” said Clack, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, in a news release. “We’re after a better understanding of how the airborne virus behaves in enclosed livestock operations and what technologies can best protect animals and workers.”
The research team previously developed a plasma reactor that reduced the number of infectious viruses in the air by 99.9%. The new study will expand on this by testing how nonthermal plasma inactivates viruses in air containing pollutants like ammonia. Researchers are specifically interested in how these pollutants and plasma treatment influence the air’s pH levels, which can impact viral infectivity.
“A key question we’re looking at is, ‘What will happen with pH levels—how do they impact the infectivity of the viruses?'” said Clack, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, in a news release. “The air pollutants tend to raise the pH in the air, but nonthermal plasma reduces pH.”
Allen Haddrell, research fellow at the University of Bristol in the UK, will utilize a new technology to measure the duration of the virus’s infectivity in the air. Traditional methods often miss the first 20 minutes of infectivity decay, leading to inconsistent results across different research groups. Haddrell’s technique involves levitating virus-containing droplets into an electrodynamic field to measure how different environmental conditions, such as humidity and gas composition, drive viral decay.
The project aims to provide the agricultural industry with tools to handle future outbreaks while also laying the groundwork for responses to human respiratory pandemics. Protecting workers in enclosed environments remains a priority for healthcare and agricultural officials.
“During COVID, workers in these enclosed livestock or processing operations were 50 to 70 times more at risk for contracting the virus, according to a GAO report from 2023,” said Clack, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, in a news release.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) report highlighted that close working conditions were a primary source of risk. Researchers believe that understanding the decay rate of airborne viruses like bird flu will help devise more effective protection for both workers and animals from future infectious respiratory diseases.
