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Knowing the transmission factors and the natural environment that favor the spread of a viral infection is crucial to stop outbreaks and develop effective preventive strategies. This work aims to evaluate the role of Particulate Matter (PM) in the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing especially on that of PM as a vector for SARS-CoV-2. Exposure to PM has been related to new cases and to the clinical severity of people infected by SARS-CoV-2, which can be explained by the oxidative stress and the inflammatory response generated by these particles when entering the respiratory system, as well as by the role of PM in the expression of ACE-2 in respiratory cells in human hosts. In addition, different authors have detected SARS-CoV-2 RNA in PM sampled both in outdoor and indoor environments. The results of various studies lead to the hypothesis that the aerosols emitted by an infected person could be deposited in other suspended particles, sometimes of natural but especially of anthropogenic origin, that form the basal PM. However, the viability of the virus in PM has not yet been demonstrated. Should PM be confirmed as a vector of transmission, prevention strategies ought to be adapted, and PM sampling in outdoor environments could become an indicator of viral load in a specific area.

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The present article proposes a climatic approach to the study of the interaction between influenza spreading and climatic and meteorological factors in different climatic domains of the Iberian Peninsula. This association can be used to help in the prevention and mitigation of influenza epidemics. A biometeorological index has been defined and applied to the epidemic periods that took place in the Iberian Peninsula between 2000 and 2009 considering its climatic domains.

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The following paper presents the history of the Climate and Human Health Commission at the International Society of Biometeorology after more than one decade since its creation. A brief history of the origins of the human biometeorology is revealed through some of the main research topics and publications of the founders of the society in this field. Secondly, it is presented as a brief review of the activities of the commission in the last 10 years, based on the reports that have periodically been submitted by members of the commission to the Bulletin of the society. A summary of the topics of interest on human biometeorology and the most frequent research topics are also described. Thirdly, the need of adapting human biometeorology contents, methods and techniques to a changing world is articulated according to some of the new environmental threats in the XXI century. Finally, a list of future actions and research lines collected through a form from members of the commission is presented. The paper concludes with the existence of great challenge for human biometeorology in order to transform biometeorological knowledge into specific services to improve the wellbeing of human beings.

Processing data that originates from different sources (such as environmental and medical data) can prove to be a difficult task, due to the heterogeneity of variables, storage systems, and file formats that can be used. Moreover, once the amount of data reaches a certain threshold, conventional mining methods (based on spreadsheets or statistical software) become cumbersome or even impossible to apply. Data Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) solutions provide a framework to normalize and integrate heterogeneous data into a local data store. Additionally, the application of Online Analytical Processing (OLAP), a set of Business Intelligence (BI) methodologies and practices for multidimensional data analysis, can be an invaluable tool for its examination and mining. In this article, we describe a solution based on an ETL + OLAP tandem used for the on-the-fly analysis of tens of millions of individual medical, meteorological, and air quality observations from 16 provinces in Spain provided by 20 different national and regional entities in a diverse array for file types and formats, with the intention of evaluating the effect of several environmental variables on human health in future studies. Our work shows how a sizable amount of data, spread across a wide range of file formats and structures, and originating from a number of different sources belonging to various business domains, can be integrated in a single system that researchers can use for global data analysis and mining.