Microbiological Industrial Hygiene

Microbiological industrial hygiene is a lot wider field of science and technology than just safeguarding the industrial premises, air within them, products produced or the personnel from the many-sided microbiological threats. However, this alertness is the basis of the discipline and it needs to be studied carefully. Also novel techniques and instruments developed for ever-increasing speed, accuracy and reliability in the hygiene control are urgently needed.

On a brisk, freezing cold day of the nearly arctic Finnish winter it is difficult to think about warming of the climate. Still there is a strong opinion expressed globally that:

1. Industrial revolution, which started some 200 hundreds of years ago, was the start for the emissions of so called greenhouse gases. They were originating mainly from the combustion of the fossil fuels. Nowadays also gases from the ever-increasing inhabitation, growing cities and traffic increase this burden.

2. Microbes at the ocean bottom or in the marshlands accelerate this development which was initially started by the industrial emissions.

We want to present the industrial microbiology as a solution to these issues. Consequently, it is important to realize the universal role that the microbes have in agriculture and forestry, industries, environment, and in human health and welfare. These subjects are interlinked. Besides the surveillance of the various microbes, we need to actively employ them as a workforce of trillions of microscale workers to produce energy, chemicals and organic fertilizers. This will implement the circulation economy, which is so very badly needed to solve the global issues of sustainability, climate and survival of mankind.

This third part of the Microbiological Hygiene series will introduce microbiological industrial hygiene from the clean room production and health care to the branches of industries, as well in the waste treatment and recycling. In fact, these all are indeed interlinked.