The Healthy Buildings Australia program addresses industry-wide obstacles that impact employee health and safety and have the potential to affect profit margins. Our focus is on modes of transmission, creating a healthy space – and a healthier bottom-line.
Cut Costs - reduces the high cost of cleaning facilities.
Boost productivity – clean environments reduce absenteeism and employee turnover.
Repeat customers – consistently clean facilities create customer loyalty.
Overall wellness – creates a sustainable hygiene program.
The Healthy Buildings program addresses obstacles in industry that stem from the spread of disease by bringing to the task products that create clean surfaces, clean air and clean hands. Below is a brief overview of some of the top, proven technologies we employ to combat the spread of pathogens that become threats to our health.
BioProtect for surfaces - BioProtect when applied to a surface provides a long term bio-static layer of protections
BioProtect for laundry – We can make antimicrobial clothing, sheets and blankets. And it can be done conveniently in a standard home laundry setting.
Sanders Filters – provide submicron filtration from .1 micron and up, this is a significantly higher level of filtration than the .....
Pure Hands – hand sanitiser provides a safe none flammable that doesn’t dry out the skin.
Manufacturing
The manufacturing environment is very focused on health and safety. Most companies view cleaning as a cost, but we view cleaning as a revenue centre. The Healthy Buildings program impacts a company’s bottom line by improving hygiene levels to directly impact productivity, absenteeism, and energy cost. We build health and pathogen control programs for all environments to keep your employees healthy and productive. Our programs are scalable for every manufacturing environment and budget.
Data Centres
We know that computers and server stacks are not worried about health, so how does the Healthy Buildings program support Data Centres? Dust particles and pollution can settle on IT equipment causing faults, corrosion and eventual failure. The combination of microfiber air filters as well as the anti-static barrier layer left by our BioProtect product ensures there are less particles in the air and surfaces are much easier to clean. Our filter system has less static pressure than most filters used in most data centres (energy savings) and they ultimately clean the air significantly better.
Energy saving from lower static pressure filters
Facility cleans faster
Anti-static floors
Near dust-free environment (Sub-micron filtration)
Cruise Lines
Seems every week you read about a sickness/disease outbreak on a cruise ship. Cruise ships bring together large numbers of people from a variety of communities and backgrounds where communicable diseases can be introduced by embarking passengers and crew members or acquired during visits to various seaports throughout a trip. The crowded, semi-enclosed environment of a ship can facilitate transmission of infectious diseases from person to person or from contaminated air and surfaces. To date the only answer seems to be more thorough and frequent cleaning, however the Healthy Buildings program can simply this and drastically assist in addressing the modes of transmission. Persistently clean air, clean hands and clean surfaces are required to minimise the risk in a cruise ship environment and that is just what we specialise in.
Passenger behaviours during norovirus outbreaks on cruise ships: Prevention and control of norovirus gastrointestinal illness may be improved by routine screening of embarking passengers, education about gastrointestinal illness and its impact on public health, a focus on improving hand washing practices, and identification of public hand sanitizer dispensing locations.
Bacteria spike just because you enter a room: Human shedding exceeds 30 million bacteria per hour. With numbers like that, it is not difficult to understand why outbreaks occur in the tightly confined spaces of a floating city. The cruise ship industry has yet to move toward persistent cleaning technologies, and the negative results are consistently demonstrated.
Cruise ship travel: Certain groups, such as pregnant women, the elderly, and those who are immune-compromised, might be more seriously affected by infectious diseases. In addition, the stress of travel can worsen chronic conditions in any population.
Acute Gastroenteritis on Cruise Ships: To determine recent rates of acute gastroenteritis on cruise ships, CDC analysed combined data for the period 2008–2014 that were submitted by cruise ships sailing in U.S. jurisdiction.
Norovirus Transmission on Cruise Ship: This investigation suggests that efforts to control gastroenteritis outbreaks on cruise ships should address all possible modes of NoV transmission, including foodborne, environmental persistence, and person-to-person spread. Such measures should include extensive disinfection, good food and water handling practices, isolating ill persons, providing paid sick leave for ill crew, and promoting hand-washing with soap and water among passengers and crew.
A large outbreak of influenza on a cruise ship causing widespread morbidity: While influenza vaccination of passengers and crew may afford some protection, uptake and effectiveness may not be sufficient to prevent outbreaks. Surveillance systems and early intervention measures, such as antiviral therapies, should be considered to detect and control such outbreaks.
Farming and Feed Lotg
Antimicrobial resistance is prevalent in industrial animal husbandry and cropping while market forces are shifting to stop the use of antibiotics in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and the use of non-organic pesticides and herbicides. This change will require biosecurity measures to change inside the primary producing industry sooner rather than later. Solid cleanliness and pathogen control systems like the Healthy Buildings approach negate the need for current antibiotic, pesticide and herbicide practices to remain in operation.
Bio-aerosol in barn air impacts the health of people and animals: This study concludes that multiple exposures to endotoxin-containing swine barn air induce AHR, increase in mucus-containing airway epithelial cells and lung inflammation. The data also show that prolonged multiple exposures may also induce adaptation in AHR response in the exposed subjects.
Threat of campylobacter in poultry flocks: Travel-associated infections are an important factor to consider and together with the changing global food markets, such as increasing consumption of imported chicken, these will affect Campylobacter infections worldwide.
Multi-site study on handwashing after contact with animals: The goal of this study was to compare and contrast the use of personal protective equipment (PPE) and the practice of handwashing among participants of four studies assessing poultry and swine farms in the Midwestern United States and in Thailand.
Aerosol transmission and disease: The results from this study indicate that the risk of the spread of PRRSV via aerosols is likely minimal and supports the observations and conclusions of several previous studies showing that aerosol spread of PRRSV is limited to a couple of meters. This is in contrast to recent reports indicating that isolates such as MN-184 can spread via aerosols over distances of several miles.
Wind-borne disease modelling: To assist management of the potential spread of serious disease like FMD in cloven-hoofed animals, prediction models should be able to determine an accurate range and area of outbreak in advance as well as required minimum data can be obtained since error of prediction might cause serious impact.
Hospitals
Hospital-acquired infections and antimicrobial resistance is being covered by every major news team, and for good reason. One in twenty people who enter a hospital in the United States end up with problems related to secondary infections. With bacteria becoming more and more resistant to antibiotics, it is clear we must reduce the spread of infections within our hospital systems through intelligent, organic and non-toxic programs like Healthy Buildings.
Bio-aerosol in hospitals: Exposed-plate method was found to capture microorganisms efficiently with little variation in duplicate samples, suggesting its use in hospitals for preliminary assessment of indoor air quality and determine pathogenic microorganisms due to particle fallout.
Airborne bio loads in health care settings in South Africa: Results from this study indicate the importance of air quality monitoring in health-care settings to prevent possible hospital-acquired infections and contamination of hospital surfaces including food contact surfaces by airborne contaminants.
Evidence of hand hygiene to reduce transmission and infections by multidrug resistant organisms in healthcare settings: The emergence of resistance in these microorganisms has mainly been caused by an inappropriate use of antibiotics in general and use of broad spectrum antibiotics in particular.
Cleaning Hospital Room Surfaces to Prevent Health Care–Associated Infections: A Technical Brief: Emerging technologies have led to increased interest in evaluating environmental cleaning, disinfecting, and monitoring in the acute care hospital setting.
How sinks cause the spread of disease: In a devilish case of unintended consequences, sinks have been linked to a number of outbreaks of serious infections in hospitals from Baltimore to Shanghai and many places in between in recent years.
Remote Locations / FIFO
Poor expeditionary health negatively impacts a company’s bottom line. The cost of an illness or outbreak at a remote site can translate into thousands of dollars of expense for the business. Improving hygiene levels directly impacts productivity, absenteeism and energy costs. Using our program also lowers overall cleaning costs within a site. We build infection, odour and pathogen control programs for all environments to ensure your employees remain healthy and productive. Our programs are scalable for every business budget.
Mass Transit
Our global transportation industry has the ability to move a sick person around the globe within 24hrs. The ability to transport disease from continent to continent dramatically increases the risk of contamination as different places have different tolerances. SARS, Ebola and the MERS spread around the world through the wonders of modern air travel. Large numbers of people packed into small places increase bio-loading significantly and all of this can be prevented or the risk significantly reduces through the implementation of intelligent, organic and non-toxic approaches like the Healthy Buildings program.
Sewage and antimicrobial resistance: Global spread of antimicrobial resistance in bacterial pathogens is another major threat against human health, yet we don’t know much about how these genes travel and spread worldwide.
Urban Transit systems and bacteria: Mass transit systems host large volumes of passengers and facilitate a constant stream of human/human and human/built environment microbial transmission. The largest urban mass transit system in the United States (that in New York) facilitates an average of 11 million trips per weekday.
Global transportation systems aid in the spread of disease: Future challenges must focus on incorporating information on temporal variations in passenger numbers, stopover risks, intra-species competition, human populations at risk, breeding site availability, possible climate change, disinfection and land transport, as well as quantifying the relative importance of all types of transport for vector and disease movement.
Mass transit and germs: Mass transit environments, specifically, urban subways, are distinct microbial environments with high occupant densities, diversities, and turnovers, and they are thus especially relevant to public health.
Air quality in mass transportation: The air quality in mass transport buses, especially air-conditioned buses may affect bus drivers who work full time.
Risk assessment for the spread of disease on planes: The resulting disease-specific operational documents provide a host of viable options for decision-makers, particularly when faced with the choice of whether to contact trace air travellers and crew that were potentially exposed to infectious diseases during a flight.