In her 1859 book, Notes on Nursing, Florence Nightingale (2007) asserted, “The very first canon of nursing... the first essential to the patient, without which all the rest you can do for him is as nothing... is this: To Keep the Air He Breathes as Pure as the External Air, Without Chilling Him” (p. 12).
Nightingale knew that fresh air of the appropriate temperature was essential to a person’s ability to heal and remain well. She went on to say, “To attempt to keep a ward warm at the expense of making the sick repeatedly breathe their own hot, humid, putrescent atmosphere is a certain way to delay recovery or to destroy life” (p. 14).
Every day, we take approximately 24,000 breaths of air. This is equal to 2 gallons of air per minute or 3,000 gallons of air per day. Because breathing is essential to life, we need to be sure that the quality of every breath we take is optimal (Girman, Vigna, & Lee, 2004).
The quality of the air we breathe is a critical factor in health and well-being. Air pollution is a major environmental risk to health, affecting everyone in developed and developing countries alike. Even in low concentrations, pollutants have been associated with a range of adverse health effects such as stroke, heart disease, lung cancer, and both chronic and acute respiratory diseases, including asthma (World Health Organization [WHO], 2016). When air quality is discussed, most individuals think of outdoor air pollution, but poor indoor air quality is also considered a risk for more than 50% of the world’s population. Especially in homes where biomass fuels (such as wood or wood chips) or coal are used for cooking and heating, indoor air pollution can be 10 to 50 times higher than recommended guidelines and be particularly hazardous to health (WHO, 2016).