Electrostatic Dust Cloth: Comparison
Please note this is a comparison between Version 2 by Conner Chen and Version 1 by Carla Viegas.

Electrostatic dust cloths (EDC) have been widely used for microbiologic contamination assessment in different indoor and occupational environments. Electrostatic clodusth is cloth that is typically treated with chemicals so that it becomes s are negatively charged. This is helpful when you are dusting, because the negative charge of the cloth pulls in dust particles allowing dust particles to settle with greater ease.

  • EDC

1. Exposure Assessment and the Use of Electrostatic Dust Cloths

Current sampling strategies used for microbial exposure assessment may ineffectively describe significant exposures. Even if we apply the state-of-the-art regarding analyses, the information can be biased if our sampling techniques are not properly selected [1]. Thus, it is critical to select the best sampling approach to allow the accurate measurement and identification of the microbiological agents present in the indoor environments to be assessed.
In a recent study performed by Adams et al. (2021) [2] in a school’s environment and using electrostatic dust collectors (EDC) it was possible to identify the microorganisms related to inspection-based building moisture damage and then examine the links between those microbial exposures and health effects [2]. Indeed, this sampling method has been widely used for microbiologic contamination assessment in different indoor and occupational environments (Table 1). If the intention is to perform viability studies, the electrostatic cloth used should not be impregnated with any kind of biocide to avoid impairing the viability of the microorganisms viability.
This sampling method is appropriate for large-scale epidemiological studies intending to measure microbial exposure, and to complement exposure information collected by building inspections dedicated to spotting dampness and mold [3,4]. EDC is also being used to assess microbial contamination using molecular tools as stand-alone analyses [4,5,6,7,8], even the most refined ones such as sequencing [2], or using side by side, culture-dependent, and independent methods [3,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23]. In fact, the use of qPCR analyses from EDC is a promising tool to accurately measure microbial contamination in dwellings [4,8,24]. Additionally, it has also been used to perform the fungal azole resistance screening in different indoor environments [12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26] and to identify MRSA presence and level of contamination in specific occupational environments [7]. Further, aside from microbial contamination, this sampling method has been applied to assess microbial metabolites, such as endotoxins [27,28,29] and mycotoxins [18,22]. Furthermore, the EDC was also used as a sampling method to measure antigen concentrations with enzyme immunoassays specific for storage mites [30].

2. Electrostatic Dust Cloths’ Features

As all passive sampling methods, it allows a more integrated time exposure assessment (workshift, days, weeks, or months), since it can collect during different periods of time depending on the activities, work shifts, and expected contamination [2,15,17,18]. In fact, this sampling method can be applied for prolonged periods of time, and, because of that, they allow us to overcome the major drawback of short-term active air sampling, which is highly sensitive to large temporal fluctuations in the airborne microbial load that might be associated to specific events that occur only sporadic in a specific workplace or indoor environment [4]. They have a very low cost (petri dish and an electrostatic cloth) and do not require microbiological training to set up and can be applied by the study subjects themselves in their dwellings [4]; however, in the workplaces, the EDC should be placed by a trained technician to select the proper sampling sites considering the study aim and the most suitable surfaces (preferably elevated surfaces at the height of 1.5–2.5 m) avoiding sampling sites with major airflow disturbances [2,15,17,18]. EDC placed on an elevated surface, besides collecting particles over a known time period, allows capturing airborne dust instead of floor-based particles that may never become sufficiently airborne to contribute to human exposure by inhalation [6]. Previously, a study performed by Madsen and colleagues (2012) [3] reported the need to place the EDC on open surfaces during sampling and that obtained can be frozen at −80 °C with glycerol without disturbing the microorganisms’ number considerably [3].