04/05/2025
Air filters reduce sick days
School attendance increased by 1.3 days per pupil per year when five elementary schools in Milan, Italy, introduced air filters into classrooms, in the first randomised controlled trial of its kind.
“It’s the first experimental evidence,” says Stefania Renna at the Polytechnic University of Milan. Her team installed high-quality portable air purifiers in 43 randomly chosen classrooms in the schools. Renna describes these as being better than HEPA filters.
The researchers recorded an increase in attendance of 1.3 days per pupil per year in the classrooms with air filters, which corresponded with a 12.5 per cent fall in absenteeism. “It’s a pretty large effect,” says Renna, who presented the results at a meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna, Austria, this week.
Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2478252-air-filters-in-classrooms-reduce-sick-days-by-more-than-10-per-cent/
Image: Arne Dedert/dpa/Alamy Live News
