"Scientist says" - okay, that's not very useful, which scientist? What science? What research? What's it being backed by? What money flows are behind it? What's the conflict of interest report?

Any time a headline says "scientists say" that's just some sort of crappy marketing signal, not actually a useful thing to put in your headline because those words in that way lost their value.

It used to be that a scientist was someone who was an actual scientist, applying scientific principles and having an accredited master or maybe even doctorate. And then it also wasn't "they said" but "published" or "reported" or "found evidence of".

In this case it happens to be:

- Joseph Allen

- runs a major public health research project at Harvard University (Associate Professor)

- consults with companies on ventilation and air filtration

- writing dozens of op-eds

- washed out as an FBI recruit

- doctoral thesis at the Boston University School of Public Health

- a bunch of Director, Co-Director, Deputy Director, Commissioner, Chair, Advisory Group things

- Has a bunch of publications which has his name on it, but also a billion other names, and as far as I know people tend to stick on a bunch of names that didn't actually 'do the work', but simply were guiding tutor style personal advisors.

The Boston thing seems to be:

> We used personal air samplers to measure indoor air exposure to polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) for 20 residents of the Greater Boston Area (Massachusetts). Area air measures were simultaneously collected from two rooms in each participant's home.

So the entirety of what's visible on the surface doesn't tell me much, except:

- Does a lot of management type of thing

- No quantitative hard science, just low sample sized tests

- Mostly busy being 'visible' (be it marketing or talking head for a group that did the actual science)

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying "this person is bad, this advice is bad, and there is nothing here to support any of this". I am saying that some magazine headline with a "scientist says" just doesn't have a lot of meaning. This guy might very well know his stuff, but it's pretty hard to derive that from whatever is published in magazines and sites.

At the same time it seems somewhat obvious that if we, as mankind, go and modify the air we live in by constructing boxes to live and work in with minimal airflow (be it cycling or fresh air replacement) that you would normally have done by general weather patterns and nature, we're probably not going to be better for it. That doesn't mean we need a company to invent an 'outdoor air simulator' to buy, but it might mean that having a well-sealed building requires some compensating features (be it air replacement/flow from outside, or some other method like strategic vents that make use of differences in airflow speeds around the building). Making sure that you don't collect a lot of particulate matter and just floats through the air all the time has an impact. (or, as others have posted: cleaning up your durst and mopping) Measuring your air quality can give you an idea if what you are doing is making things worse or better (i.e. if you have forced-air AC and you turn it on, you can probably see CO2 levels either rise or drop, same as when you have air vents or windows to the outside you can open - requires the air outside to be reasonable of course).