Background

The University of Texas at Tyler's College of Engineering and Computer Science has received $3,750,000 from the Emerging Technology Fund/Research Superiority Acquisition of Talent Grant to establish TxAIRE, the Texas Allergy, Indoor Environment, and Energy Institute. Further, The University of Texas at Tyler and the University of Texas System have committed $2,500,000 to support TxAIRE over five years.

The mission of TxAIRE will be to provide the infrastructure and critical mass of first-rate authorities for its academic, health, and industrial partners to identify and understand indoor air pollutants, assess their health effects, develop new technologies for improving residential air quality and controlling associated energy costs, and bring those products to commercialization. TxAIRE will focus on applied technologies that will lead to viable products that can be taken to market quickly either by new start-up firms or by expansions within existing manufacturers in the region. The ultimate purpose of TxAIRE is to generate significant expansions and new business ventures for manufacture of IEQ and micro-CHP products in Northeast Texas.

Why TxAIRE?

The problem? Asthma and allergies have increased drastically during the last decades. E.g. today a majority of children of 13 years of age has had an allergic reaction, and about 40% have asthma or rhinitis. The most common reason for children to attend hospitals are asthma like symptoms.

You get sick due to the way you are constructed, meaning your genes and your exposure (including lifestyle). Genes play a major role for who gets affected, but genes have not changed during the last decades in a way that can explain the major increase in the population in asthma and allergies. So it has to be “exposure”, but what exposure? Is it the outdoor air, the food, or indoor air? In mass the by far greatest exposure is to indoor air in homes, especially for a newborn baby. So in what way can indoor air give us allergies? Is it due to that homes are cleaner than before (less microorganisms), or less clean? Tobacco smoking? Mold? New chemicals? Less ventilation? No one knows!

The indoor environment in homes has changed dramatically during the last decades, as a result of numerous new building and furnishing material, new consumer products, and less ventilation. Few large scale studies have been conducted on the indoor environment in homes and its association with asthma and allergies, especially with regard to the general population. The largest studies have been conducted in Sweden (DBH and Bamse), Norway, Bulgaria (ALLHOME) and Singapore. Ongoing are studies in Taiwan and Denmark. The results so far indicate that reduced ventilation, dampness, and new chemicals are the main risk factors for allergy and asthma in these countries. A study like these have not been made in USA, which means that we are lacking baseline data on homes in USA, and what the risk factors for allergy and asthma are in such homes.

That is the background to the study TxAIRE is now conducting in Texas. We are working in order to learn about the indoor environment in homes in Texas, which in many respects are different from the indoor environment in other parts of the world. The aim is to find the causes of asthma and allergies. But the ultimate aim of TxAIRE is also to find solutions to these problems. If the causes are in our indoor environment, which is our working hypothesis, then the solution will be in reducing the sources of pollution (building materials, consumer products, etc.) and/or in air cleaning products, or increased ventilation. Today, we do not know what the most cost-effective action is, but we will find out.

There is a great need for new effective appliances, e.g. air cleaners, to reduce the health problems. The result may also indicate a need for more ventilation, meaning a higher energy consumption. This is a major problem, and will also be dealt with in our research. TxAIRE will, thus, work with all aspects of this problem. It is not an easy problem, if so, it had been solved a long time ago! In collaboration with scientists all around the world we are trying to solve this major health riddle. In conclusion, TxAIRE science is needed in order to solve the world-wide problem of asthma and allergies.